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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

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

“THE DISLOCATION OF MAN

IN THE MODERN AGE”: THE PILGRIM CONDITION

AND MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN CATHOLIC LITERATURE

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 solitary crazy Catholic mystic” (vi) while “the unifying theme of [Scorsese’s] movies is the possibility of redemption […] Catholicism is the determining force in Scorsese’s sense of that environment” (Occhiogrosso 89). Each of these authors produced major works during this time that were informed by and reflected specific notions of

Catholicism and the American Catholic’s experience. This group, working in the years leading up to, including, and in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, in some ways were a literary version of the Council, bringing Catholic literature into the new world of

America through works influenced by and indicative of their creators’ Catholic backgrounds.

The works produced by this group differed from the other texts that stood as examples of

Catholicism in the American literary discourse, such as Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the

Archbishop and Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. While those texts draw on

Catholic images, either members of the Church itself or some of the iconography associated with the religion, their thematic ends point towards things that are general and not particularly

Catholic and thus not fully representative of the Catholic experience of America. By contrast, the authors of the mid twentieth century, in works such as the stories collected in 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, created texts that are both distinctly Catholic but also indicative of the worldview that an American Catholic living at that time would possess, emphasizing the nature of man as pilgrim and in between past and present as the Church aimed to strengthen its place within the modern world as a body defined as being a

“pilgrim church.”

Historical Context—The Catholic In America

To understand what gave rise to this group of Catholic authors in the mid-twentieth century and why their particular Catholic concerns would often relate back to man’s position as a pilgrim in the modern world and trying to bring together and reconcile the past and present, it is first necessary to establish the literary and cultural climate for Catholics in America leading up to the mid-twentieth century. The perception of Catholicism in the United States has, for most of the country's history, been colored by suspicion and prejudice. From the Know-Nothing Party of the

1850s, which promised to purify America of Catholic immigrants, to the election of 1960, where many were concerned that John F. Kennedy was an agent of the Catholic Church, Americans struggled to integrate Catholicism into its national conception of itself. While "Catholicism is now as rooted in the national landscape as Protestantism," the religion "had a slower time obtaining acceptance" in the American culture and escaping "[s]uspicions of subterfuge" and being seen as "superstitious and ritualistic" (Gottschalk 53-55). This distrust of Catholicism, one present throughout most of America's existence, emanated from many different sources. The existence of the Vatican itself, namely a specific physical and geographic location that "was alarmingly visible […] known by its structure and government and possessing the fullness of authority to judge ideas and nations" (American Catholic Revolution 8), gave many Americans

pause as to whether or not Catholics could actually be loyal Americans given that they also possessed an allegiance to a church headquartered in a foreign land. To many Catholicism was incompatible with being an American, assuring that "there was no shortage […] within the

Protestant-dominated United States" of "anti-Catholic bigotry" (Gillis 68) directed at a people that "provided the single largest pool of others" in a "North American public culture […] rooted in a profoundly Protestant ordering of human society"1(Anti-Catholicism in America 7-8) and "a group of epistemological or philosophical ideas […] against which Catholic theology posed a profound ideational threat" (Anti-Catholicism in America 10). As “the story of Catholics in

America is largely the story of an immigrant church” and through a distrust of those coming to

America from foreign lands created “the separation of Catholics from the mainstream of

American life” (Communion of Immigrants x) that would persist through much of America’s history. From the nation's inception through the early decades of the twentieth century, what dominated "[t]he American cultural circumstance" was "anti-Catholic nativism […] embedded in the very structures of our democratic culture" (Anti-Catholicism in America 194), but the impetus for change would arrive in America and affect how Catholicism was perceived.

The Catholic Church itself viewed America in a marginal way as well, as it was not "[u]ntil

June 29, 1908 [that] Rome considered the American church a missionary territory" and that it was a place where "Catholicism had not been fully established, and the task required the assistance of foreign clergy" (Gillis 48). While Americans cultivated a healthy distrust of

Catholics, the Vatican was also slow to fully embrace America and see it as a fully integrated part of the worldwide church, particularly as a country that forced those who practiced the religion to the margins of its society. Between “the centralizing tendencies of the Roman hierarchy throughout the ninetieth century” and the dominance of a group “who saw the ‘real

church’ as being in Rome, and who therefore sought an American Catholic community which stood above and apart from the culture” (Catholics and American Culture 7), there was an inherent tension between Catholics along with the institution of the Church and the space of

America, a tension that would need to be reduced and diminished in the subsequent decades.

The pervasive sense of distrust began to dissipate in the years following World War II as

Catholics were allowed into the American experience to make a claim for their own

Americanness. As Chester Gilles writes, "the Catholic population doubled" following the Second

World War, leading to "the largest expansion of [Catholic] schools and churches since the

Council of Baltimore […] [t]he GI Bill paved the way to higher education of veterans, including those matriculating at Catholic colleges and universities in unprecedented numbers" (76-77).

Gary Willis also describes “Catholics’ participation in the war effort [during World War II] made it hard to question their American-ness” (457), helping to establish them as Americans in the truest sense of the word. Colleen McDannell notes how “World War II government propaganda was multicultural. Pamphlets and posted represented European ethnic groups and even African

Americans as having freedom and opportunity in the United States. After all, it was Hitler, not democratic Americans, who could not tolerate difference” and that “[t]he realities of the war demonstrated that something existed that was fundamentally more malevolent than the split between Catholics and Protestants” (32).

Between being included in the effort to combat fascism and evil as well as the knowledge of the divide not merely between denominations of a religion but between good and evil,

America’s collective view of the Catholic changed and giving Catholics a greater degree of importance that necessitated American society, one that frequently saw itself as intrinsically opposed to that religion, becoming a place much more accepting of Catholicism and Catholics.

"Catholics were assimilating into American society, becoming wealthier better educated, and geographically diversified […] doors were opening that would change the economic, professional, and social status of the rising generation," Gilles goes on to write about this midcentury moment when the "foundations" of "Catholic culture […] were stirring" (77), and creating "a new generation of Catholics […] com[ing] of age in the post-World War II period"

(Dolan 352). What defined the American Catholic experience at that time was this stirring and ascendancy, both of Catholics in the American social strata as well as the primacy and importance of the American church within the larger body of the Catholic Church itself.

It is perhaps no surprise that in this time colored by tumult and change, particularly involving the most prominent component of the developing twentieth century church in America, that the Vatican itself would examine its place in the modern world. It was this impulse that led to the convocation of the Second Vatican Council. Early in his papacy, John XXIII "surprised both his councilors and the world at large by announcing his desire to assemble an ecumenical council […] to focus on helping people live their faith […] address[ing] concrete, practical, and pastoral problems" encountered by the Catholic Church in this modern world. (McDannell 56-

57). The world was dramatically reshaped following World War II, as John O'Malley writes,

"[f]rom 1945 onward, the memories of the war's horrors […] gave impetus to the conviction that peoples had to work together [….] to work out old differences through dialogue around the negotiating table" (91). The need to build greater consensus and creating a world not dominated by divisions that led to the war's many atrocities was felt by the Catholic Church, which manifested itself in the Council “emphasiz[ing] the pastoral duties of the Church and the need for greater relevance to a world challenged by poverty, racism, human rights violations, and threats of nuclear annihilation” (Lichtman 267). “This situation threw a glaring light on a specific

tradition that could be taken as a symbol of the problem [within the Catholic Church]— the Latin liturgy," O'Malley describes, something that was "traditionally praised as a guarantor of Catholic unity and symbol of Catholic universality" was now perceived in this post war climate "to be just the opposite" (92). The Latin Mass was seen as indicative of the Church's inclination to separate and distance itself from the modern world, even creating distance between people attending mass and filling the pews given that the liturgy could not be performed in the vernacular and the priest would turn his back on the congregation during the service. The Council sought to make sure the church was "in tune with the times and its dogmas presented in a language reflective of modern thought" (Dolan 424), and it was this desire that led to important changes and clarifications in the

Church itself.

The Council addressed a number of issues, ranging from how the Church was to interact with other religions and address the notion of religious liberty to refinement and further explanation of issues related to the day-to-day life of Catholics around the world, affecting the direction and spirit of the Church itself. The Council was more than just "a handful of superficial adjustments of the Catholic Church to the modern world" and something that was initially anticipated as being "an inconsequential blip on the ecclesiastical radar screen" (O'Malley 311) but rather something important that greatly affected the vision and direction of the Catholic

Church. From the decisions reached by the Council to the sheer existence of the council itself as

“[b]oth the Catholic and non-Catholic world observed that not all bishops and theologians agreed on the structures and images of their faith […] reveal[ing] divisions within Catholicism […] suggest[ing] that the Church had a capacity to observe and precise its own process of stating the truth” (McDannell 116), the Second Vatican Council was truly an important moment for

Catholicism, and religion in general, in the twentieth century, if not for all of time.

While the Council addressed the church across the entire world, as it “broke the European monopoly over defining Catholic practices” (McDannell 116), there was a way in which the

United States was, to some degree, at the heart of the reforms and changes that were to come.

"After the Italians," the home country of the Vatican and thus provider of the most Council

Fathers, "the next largest contingent […] came from the United States" (McDannell 64) and

"American participation in the council […] was considerably more extensive than at Vatican I nearly a century before" (Hennesey 310). While those, such as Anita Gandolfino, contend that

"Americans were not clamoring for change in their Church" since "Catholics in the United States were enjoying the fruits of their efforts to join the American mainstream" (13), the presence of the American clergy in the proceedings of the Council as well as many of the changes that emerged from the Council, reflect the way in which the Church was affected by the growing importance of America as a place in the Church where "the strong undercurrents of reform would surface and change the nature of mainstream Catholicism" (Dolan 417). For the American

Catholic, this entire period of time was dominated by instability and change. Colleen McDaniel describes how "[f]or the generation of Catholics who came of age during World War II it was the fifties— not the sixties— that were revolutionary" (29) while Mark Massa describes the

"American Catholic Revolution" or the "Catholic sixties" which officially launched "in 1964, which was when the first (and arguably most dramatic implantation of reforms of the Second

Vatican Council (the reform of the celebration of the Mass) reached American shores" (The

American Catholic Revolution xii-xiii). While McDaniel and Massa assign specific points in time when this shift in America regarding Catholicism occurred, defining this moment in such specific terms with exact dates (or even decades) can be misleading.

Though the instillation of the reforms and changes of the Second Vatican Council played a large role in the changing attitudes and perceptions of the Catholic Church, there is a way those things can be understood as cumulative and indicative of a time period defined by flux and change that cannot be quite as neatly defined. Rather than thinking strictly in terms of preconciliar and postconciliar Catholicism, that the Church (especially the Church in America) can be understood strictly in a "before" and "after" sense, it would be both more useful and interesting to consider this entire period of the mid-twentieth century as one where the Church was constantly engaged in considering what it's place is in the modern world and even about the very nature of the world itself, particularly when a newer and more modern country such as

America was taking on a greater role in regard to the Church.

Precursors to an American Catholic Literary Tradition

Out of this moment of great tumult and change for Catholics, particularly Catholics in

America, came a flowering of a particularly American Catholic literary movement. Leading into the 1950s and 1960s, while “there was [still] in the postwar world a sense that Catholics had not yet come into their own insofar as the intellectual and cultural life of the nation was concerned”

(McInerny 8), many Catholic authors write prominent and acclaimed works, earning awards and recognition from the literary and intellectual establishment as well as in the public eye, inserting themselves and their particularly Catholic approaches into the very fabric of American literature and culture. Arnold Sparr describes how, at this time, the American Catholic intellectual community asked “where was the American [Graham] Greene? The American [Georges]

Bernanos?" (144), as European Catholics had established a distinct literary tradition through the work of authors such as the aforementioned Greene and Bernanos.2 Seeing this European

Catholic literary tradition elicited a desire amongst many American Catholic to have their own comparable literary tradition and leading to a "quest for the Great American Catholic Novel […] representing on one level the final chapter in the Catholic search for intellectual and cultural achievement" (Sparr 145). There was even some discussion from scholars, particularly Wallace

Fowlie, that “American literature is quite thoroughly non-Catholic. There has never been in this country that would resemble a Catholic school of letters or movement in literature” (225) and thus a American Catholic answer to Europe’s literary traditions would be impossible. But as

America moved into this new era, starting with the mid 1950s and continuing through the 1960s and even into the 1970s (including many years that fall after Sparr's scholarly purview, which concludes with 1960), many American Catholic authors addressed this need Sparr outlines for a major American Catholic novel and an American Catholic literary sensibility by producing works of fiction both engaged with the American literary culture while also defined by certain

Catholic qualities, both formal and thematic, and thus established an American Catholic literary tradition to rival those existing in England and France. This period, which saw Catholics win prestigious American literary awards (such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) and enjoy a prominent place within American literary culture, represents the full "Catholic

Literary Revival" about which Sparr writes.

In The Life You Save May Be Your Own, Paul Elie recounts the lives of the two most prominent of these authors (Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy) along with two other major

American Catholic voices (Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day), describing a “School of the Holy

Ghost” (xii) that may of existed at that time, going on to write:

[A] school or movement was taking shape already […] Already they were skeletally

joined, as members of a body are joined. They will have no headquarters, no

neighborhood, no university fiefdom or corner bar. They will write no manifesto, post for

no group portrait. Their unity, rather, will be that of pilgrims who are taking different

routes to the same destination, conversing at long distance from time to time. Its roots are

artistic and religious, grounded in their belief that their writing and their religious faith,

each informing the other, presents them with a predicament shared in common. (200)

In his book, Elie focuses on the historical and biographical, noting the correspondences and connection of lives between these four, but he does not broach the notion of a rising American

Catholic literary sensibility, of which O’Connor and Percy were actively participating in establishing.3 It was this moment in history that allowed for the true establishment of an

American Catholic literature that was decidedly Catholic, displayed in the work of authors such as O’Connor, Percy, Kerouac, and a director such as Scorsese. These four all share the distinction of creating works that engage with themes and ideas that were characteristic of the

Catholic mind and particularly for a Catholic living in America at that moment in history.

By creating works that are distinctively Catholic, drawing on Catholic theology and teaching while also reflecting and engaging with the experience of the Catholic living at that time, this group of O’Connor, Percy, Kerouac, and Scorsese represented a proper American

Catholic literary sensibility and thus diverged from the previous ways in which Catholicism had been present in the country’s literary landscape. Lacking a Catholic literary tradition like that possessed by many European countries in the early decades of the twentieth century, the works of that time that addressed Catholicism did so in a partial or incomplete way, having the tropes of the religion present but not engaging with the thought in a substantial way. To properly

understand the uniqueness of this American Catholic literary movement and how it fits within this midcentury period that would give rise to so many different schools and movements within the literary culture, one must first look to these texts of the earlier decades of the twentieth century. These texts, represented by Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop and Ernest

Hemingway’s The Old Man And The Sea, established a proto-Catholic literary school, one that hints at and begins the move towards the potential of literary aesthetics connected to Catholicism in America, but that does not go quite completely enough into addressing Catholicism fully and directly. The presence of Catholicism in American literature in the decades before the transformative midcentury period represented by Vatican II was smaller and distant, and would not be fully realized as a movement until O’Connor, Percy, Kerouac, and Scorsese established an

American Catholic aesthetic that directly drew upon their experience of the religion.

In Death Comes For the Archbishop, Cather (herself an Episcopalian) wrote of two priests of French origin sent out into the American west to establish the Church in New Mexico. Cather, as Guy Reynolds describes, “wrote about Catholicism when she herself had recently joined a

Protestant Church, but the reason for Cather’s attraction toward Rome probably lay in the faith’s cultural and historical significance” (8), leaving her as “an admirer” of the religion though

“not an admirer from within” (Birns 14). Despite this outsider status, Cather appears on the surface to put forth a text that would contribute to and reflect a Catholic literary sensibility in

America. Though Cather’s story itself focuses on the exploits of members of the Catholic

Church, its focus is not one that is explicitly or definitively Catholic. Cather creates a narrative about Catholics, specifically members of the Church sent into the proverbial “Augean stable” of this newly that has “not [been] cleansed” as “the few priests are without guidance or discipline

[and] they are lax in religious observance” (Cather 6) yet the focus of Cather’s novel is not

distinctively Catholic. Rather, Cather taps into something that is Christian in the broadest sense, perhaps even reaching to the most general status of spiritual, not strictly tied to one specific religious tradition. Cather’s sense of the spiritual and religious is broad and inclusive, incorporating many different traditions such as the spirituality of the Native Americans living on the lands that these two priests find themselves in, all while in the guise of being a novel that is about members of the Catholic Church.

Cather’s novel focuses on Father Jean Latour, based on the actual archbishop of the

Archdiocese of Santa Fe from that time named Jean-Baptiste Lamy, sent from Ohio into the recently annexed territory of New Mexico to establish an organized and foundational church in this new space. What Latour encounters, along with his Father Jean Vaillant, his Vicar, are numerous challenges and struggles, either with people associated with the Church who have moved away from the actual teachings or the other people living in that new frontier space, to establish the Church in this new land as “[t]he Faith planed by the Spanish friars and watered with their blood was not dead” but merely that “it awaited only the toil of the husbandman”

(Cather 26) to allow it to blossom and develop. The mystery and mystical charge Cather imbues nature with throughout the novel, particularly as nature is encountered by our two main Catholic characters, reflects the “enchanted world” in which “Catholics live” that “sees created reality as a

‘sacrament’ […] a revelation of the presence of God” (Greeley 1) and reflects Cather attempting to make an American Catholic novel in a way that goes beyond merely depicting Catholics. As he begins his journey to his new assignment in New Mexico, Father Latour witnesses “a naked, twisted trunk, perhaps ten feet high, and at the top it parted into two lateral, flat-lying branches, with a little crest of green in the centre” as “[l]iving vegetation could not present more faithfully the form of the Cross,” as Father Latour “knelt at the foot of the cruciform tree” (Cather 16). In

the midst of this untamed wilderness, Latour arrives at an image, through no crafting of man, which naturally represents those things in which he believes and to which he has devoted his life.

A later episode in the novel, as Father Latour plans to build a great cathedral in Santa Fe and sees “the rugged wall” of stone “gleaming gold above them,” he says “that hill […] is my

Cathedral […] It is the stone I have always wanted, and I found it quite by chance […] I rode up here from the west in the late afternoon; this hill confronted me as it confronts us now, and I knew instantly that it was my Cathedral” (Cather 193). Cather shows the Archbishop interacting with nature and the natural world, seeing it as a means by which he can perceive and interact with the divine. Latour, Merrill Skaggs writes, “excels in his ability to appreciate natural phenomena” as “the extraordinary power of this book comes from its landscapes or descriptions of nature” (123), reflecting something of the Catholic sensibility with the use of the natural and physical world to convey God’s presence. By offering a depiction of the missionary work performed by these Catholic priests in this fluctuating area between the Catholic Mexican land and non-Catholic America along with Latour interacting with the natural and physical in a way that might be indicative of certain Catholic qualities, Cather’s novel contains aspects of something that could be understood as an American Catholic novel.

However, while Cather does incorporate and depict those elements, they are used in such a way that points to a more universal and not specifically Catholic focus, and thus preventing this novel from doing the work of establishing this literary tradition which O’Connor, Percy,

Kerouac, and Scorsese would all establish in the following decades. Cather’s novel reflects a myriad of spiritual and religious traditions, whether it be the Catholicism of Latour and Vaillant or native American spirituality or an almost pagan-like reverence for the natural environment, the novel does not endeavor to put forth one specific prism through which one can perceive the

world. In that regard, Cather’s novel takes an approach that is at most broadly Christian, and perhaps even staying in the realm of the spiritual without being tied to a particular religious tradition. Cather hints at things that can define a Catholic literary sensibility, but she shifts those things into a realm in which they cannot be specifically defined as a means of incorporation. As

A.S. Byatt writes in an introduction to the novel, Cather “classed herself firmly as a ‘backward’ writer for ‘backward’ readers […] Miss Cather is dealing with various elements of New Mexican culture, of American culture, which, although they exist side by side in the same landscape and fresco, are part of the same world, are not blended, but clearly differentiated” (xiii). Cather gives us these differences, which thus leads to a narrative that does not take up a specifically and pointedly Catholic point of view in the narrative. She is not, to use Byatt’s terminology, blending these narratives together to reveal something particular and specific about one’s experience, for as “Cather’s layering process moves us out of a dichotomized ‘either/or’ reading of the novel and into a way of reading based on ‘both/and” (Williams 93) and thus includes a collection of different views all within the narrative of Cather’s novel.

Cather’s portrayal of the native people living on the land, and their interactions with Latour and Vaillant, reflects this more universal approach, one in keeping with the expansive nature of

Cather’s approach of “bring[ing] a whole world to the reader through the spectrum of peoples she includes within her works [as] Cather is a quintessentially American novelist, yet there is no single typical or representative American in her fiction” (Parrish 89). Talking to a trader named

Zeb Orchard after his experience in the secret cave with Jacinto when “the Native American and

European consciousnesses meet in an arena of receptivity which is never over animated, but which, in its silence, is a truly contemplative form of cultural transmission” (Daehnke 240).

While Orchard derisively comments that the Indians have “their own superstitions” and that

Latour “would never separate them from their own beliefs […] hav[ing] their own kind of mysteries,” Latour says that the Indians’ “veneration for old customs was a quality he liked in

[them] and that is played a great part in his own religion” (Cather 107). Latour takes a point of view regarding these earlier, native traditions that sees them as possessing equal validity,

“acknowledg[ing] that the Indian’s gods are as living as his Catholic God” (Parrish 90). Rather than having this figure of Catholic authority possess a negative and disparaging view of these native traditions and making the novel one about a Catholic priest attempting to tame the wild and savage native people to turn them into good practicing Catholics, Cather has Latour view these people and their beliefs and traditions with an appreciation that goes beyond one particular religious denomination. As “[a] place of convergences,” Adam Jabbur writes, “Latour’s diocese furnishes a context through which Cather develops, but also complicates and deconstructs, the binary between European narrative and southwestern counter-narrative” (403), particularly through Latour’s move towards appreciation and “generous missionary work and benevolent dealings with the southwestern people” (Sevick 203).

The appreciation for the Native Americans and their ways appears again later in the novel when Father Latour visits and stays with Eusabio, a Navajo chief and “one of the most influential men among the Navajo people […] respected for his intelligence and authority, and admired for his fine presence” (Cather 175). In this episode, we can once again see this emphasis on a common humanity and a shared sense of the spiritual and the religious, indicative of “a novel about the Southwest and its Pueblo cultures, [which] extends academic efforts to understand

Hispanic and Indian America” (Reynolds 6). What Cather portrays is the connection that exists between the native people and an outsider coming to the land such as Latour, the kind of common humanity that transcends race and religions. Eusabio “wore an expression of religious

gravity” (Cather 184) and “[t]ravelling with Eusabio was like traveling with the landscape made human” (Cather 185), giving Latour an experience of his definition of the miraculous as being

“our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always” (Cather 40). As “the Navajo was careful to obliterate every trace of their temporary occupation” while traveling, “pass[ing] through a country without disturbing anything […] vanish[ing] into the landscape” (Cather 185), they aim to preserve the beauty of nature so it can be perceived clearly and that miraculous moment of perception can be preserved.

By contrast, “the white man’s way,” and thus the way of Latour and his countrymen, is “to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, to make it over a little” and thus “arrange and re-create” while the Native Americans “treated [the land] with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it” (185-186).

That Latour would privilege this chief of the Navajo, someone who is not a Catholic and of a separate spiritual tradition, reflects a desire both in Latour and Cather “to find the proper vantage point from which to reconcile disparate elements—Christian and pagan. East and West, old and new, matter and spirit, mundane and miraculous […] transmut[ing] pagan or natural beauty into the stuff of Christianity” (Leroux 217-218) and thus makes this a text that is not a strictly Catholic one in spite of being one that focused on Catholic characters. It is the realm of the miracle, that actions of God, to improve and enhance the landscape in the eye of the perceiver, not of man, and Latour witnesses these Native Americans passing through the land in such a way to not affect it and thus preserving it so that it can be transformed through an act of the divine. Merrill Skaggs writes of how “Religion is a major source of beauty and art in this narrative, so that religion itself comes to seem, by the end, the highest art of any culture. Thus, the novel leads to a deep respect for all religion, as for all functional and indigenous forms of

art” (124). Cather focuses on the religious, in all its forms and manifestations, as a source of beauty and transcendence. While this can include the Catholicism of Latour and Vaillant, it is not exclusive to them and their beliefs.

It is in this way that later authors, those who would make greater claims to a Catholic aesthetic, would differ from Cather and what she does in Death Comes for the Archbishop as they would endeavor to address the world in a way that is highly characteristic of the Catholic experience. In writing about the landscapes of the novel, Deborah Lindsay Williams describes how Cather “deliberately does not provide us with the means to ‘translate’ her landscape into meaning; we can only ‘divine’ meaning” (80) and that “[t]he layers of the novel, which resemble the striations in a mesa, create a novel structured to collapse seeming oppositions, such as pagan and Christian, Europe and America, past and present, into one another” (82). It is this element of

Cather’s novel, this yoking together and connecting of seemingly disparate spiritual and religious traditions into one larger narrative, one “in which there is no perspective, in which everything,

Old World and New, Catholic and pagan, youth and age, is layered together” (Williams 96), that keep it from being a text that reflects the particular and specific qualities of the American

Catholic experience in the literary form.

Another work by another major American author would appear and, much like Death

Comes for the Archbishop, appeared to engage with Catholicism and its place within American literature— Ernest Hemingway’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Old Man and the Sea. This novella, which served as a comeback for the author and a reassertion of his presence of the American literary scene, was widely read as the work in which Hemingway most directly engaged with

Christian (and specifically Catholic), concepts. Though scholars such as Joseph Waldmier have said with the novella that Hemingway “is no more Christian now than he was when he wrote The

Sun Also Rises” (356), or H.R. Stoneback description of Hemingway’s writing as being “rooted in his religious sensibility, and the work is most deeply accessible through an understanding of his Catholic vision” (459), The Old Man and the Sea stands as a culmination of Hemingway’s engagement with the religious, particularly the Christian. Flannery O’Connor noted this in a letter to Robert and Sally Fitzgerald collected in The Habit of Being, referencing William

Faulkner’s review of the novella for the journal Shenandoah in which he wrote that it was this work in which Hemingway “discovered God, a Creator” and speaking herself of the novel like

“it sounded to me like [Hemingway] was discovering something new maybe for him” (HB 56).

The symbols and ideas of the Christian religion were brought into the forefront in The Old Man and the Sea, noted by contemporaries such as Faulkner and O’Connor, and with “[t]he Christian religious symbols running through the story, which are so closely interwoven with the story” what one often arrives at is “an allegorical intention on Hemingway’s part” (Waldmeir 349).

This religious sensibility in Hemingway’s narrative of an aged Cuban fisherman named

Santiago and his struggle to bring in a large marlin— his first big catch after many sparse days of fishing— emerges through Hemingway’s description of Santiago’s plight and struggle to bring in the marlin, one using imagery that invokes Christ’s suffering, giving the novella “its parable-like aspects” that Carlos Baker notes as being one of the qualities that stood out to most readers

(321). Scott Donaldson notes that this character “is virtually inundated with religious imagery”

(239) while also “show[ing], in his own right, certain qualities of mind and heart which are clearly associated with the character and personality of Jesus Christ in the Gospel stories” (Baker

299). The physical suffering Santiago endures throughout the fishing excursion, that “his left hand was cramped […] drew up tight on the heavy cord” (Hemingway 58) or feeling “[t]he speed of the line […] cutting his hands badly” and “burn[ing] his back and his left hand […]

taking all the strain and cutting badly” (Hemingway 82-83), allows us to see “Santiago’s experience is a form of martyrdom […] The old man’s only fault, if it is a fault, consists in doing to the best of his ability what he was born to do” (Baker 315) or even as a kind of “[p]ilgrimage, the notion and motion of spiritualized travel” that Stoneback argues “is at the center of

Hemingway’s religious vision” (457) through the journey he undergoes with this fish. Santiago’s struggle with the great marlin, and the physical wounding he endures through that struggle, become a kind of penance he undertakes or part of a journey he undergoes.

Santiago’s exclamation in frustration upon seeing the sharks circling and eyeing the recently caught marlin reflects this martyr-ly, Christ-like quality. This sound “is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood”

(Hemingway 107), calling to mind Christ’s crucifixion and connects the suffering of Santiago with the suffering and death of Christ. “The affiliations” that Hemingway’s novella and its titular character makes with “Christian lore” through “its several allusions to Christian symbolism, particularly the crucifixion” (Young 129) come from Hemingway’s depiction of Santiago’s narrative, whether in the physical suffering he must endure or that the sharks eat the marlin that was to be his prized catch and that Santiago must endure this more metaphorical suffering, that

“[t]he Christian symbolism so evident here shifts from man to fish— a legitimate symbol for

Christ since the beginning of Christianity, as it was a legitimate religious symbol before

Christianity— and back to man throughout the story” (Waldmeir 350) as the fish itself is slowly consumed by the circling sharks comes to represent the suffering of Christ as well. This penitential suffering reflects William Cain’s claim that “[f]or Hemingway, Jesus was not the

Redeemer but the peerless embodiment of a life of pain. Jesus accepted a mission: he knew he was dead the moment he was born. He embraced it freely because he knew that through his death

was eternal life for all mankind” (565), a model Santiago followed as displayed in his claim that

“man is not made for defeat […] a man can be destroyed but not defeated” (Hemingway 103).

He will endure great suffering, and in the case of Santiago only return to shore with the great skeleton of the marlin, but he will not acquiesce to the pain with which he must deal.

Beyond this way in which the old man’s struggle with the fish is depicted in terms that call to mind a Christ-like suffering and penance, Santiago makes references to Catholic practices.

Though Santiago says about himself that he is “not religious” and “could not remember the prayer” so “he would say them fast so that they would come automatically,” he will “say ten Our

Fathers and then Hail Marys that [he] should catch this fish” (Hemingway 64-65). These prayers serve as tools or strength for Santiago, something he can use to help him in this struggle. Along with saying those prayers, the old man also “promise[s] to make a pilgrimage to the Virgin of

Cobre if [he] catch[es] him” (Hemingway 65), referring to a major and famous shrine to the

Virgin Mary located in Cuba. Santiago, whether using the specific and defined prayers of the

Catholic Church or one of its most well-known spaces and sites of pilgrimage in Cuba, is drawing on these forms of Catholicism for strength during this journey, a religion that he might not be involved with an a devout practitioner of but something with which he is familiar and has some kind of association. As Carlos Baker writes, “[Santiago’s] allusions to Christ, to God, and to the Virgin are never oaths, as one might expect to find them in the mouth of a professional fisherman out of Havana. They are rather simple petitions to a presumably available source of strength of which he feels the need” (300), but this “available source of strength” is one that comes from a Catholic place.

Hemingway’s text is like Cather’s novel in that it takes a more broadly Christian approach, not the particularly Catholic one it might appear to have at first and thus keeps it from being an

attempt by Hemingway to establish an American Catholic literary approach. Hemingway’s relationship with Catholicism was indeed a much stronger and closer one than Cather’s as he had been received into the Church after marrying his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. While Cather’s interest in Catholicism and those members of its priesthood that would provide the inspiration for the characters of Death Comes for the Archbishop was born from an outside vantage point,

Hemingway was coming from the inside to some degree. Despite Hemingway’s closer proximity to the Catholic faith, The Old Man and the Sea shares with Death Comes for the Archbishop an approach to the religious and Christian sensibility that draws on these Catholic figures and images but does not use them to convey specifically Catholic ideas. Scott Donaldson notes that

“Hemingway used Christian symbolism in his fiction as it suited his artistic purposes, not so much out of calculation as instinctively” (238), something that can be seen in The Old Man and the Sea as “Hemingway carefully refrained from taking doctrinaire sides in all his dramatizations of religious motifs” (Baker 327). For Hemingway, these religious motifs are tools, much like the prayers are for Santiago, from which he will draw on and use for his own thematic ends, “a singularly appropriate writer to consider in terms of a usable past, which made available to him the traditional rituals and myths of Christianity” (Hamilton 142).

Just as Cather yokes together the Christian and the non-Christian pagan tradition in Death

Comes for the Archbishop, collapsing the two together, Hemingway uses the imagery and tropes of the Christian religion (particularly as it relates to the “ironic paradox in both Hemingway’s and Christian thought: the inseparability of suffering and Grace” (Hamilton 141) and deploys them in The Old Man and the Sea to convey something much more universal about the human experience as “Hemingway has finally taken the decisive step in elevating what might be called his philosophy of Manhood to the level of a religion” reflecting “Hemingway’s concern with

man as man, with man in his relation to things of this world almost exclusively. The other world,

God, does not often enter into the thoughts, plans, or emotions of a Hemingway character. God exists— most of the characters are willing to admit His existence, or at least, unwilling to deny it— but not as an imminent Being, not even benevolent or malevolent” (Waldmeir 351). As

Carlos Baker notes, “[I]t is not necessarily a Christian victory [for Santiago] Yet it is clear that

Hemingway has awfully enhanced the native power of his tragic parable by enlisting the further power of Christian symbolism” (319), which reflects the fact that Hemingway might invoke

Christianity and its imagery in his writing and he might not abolish the presence or need for God, but his concern is with man alone and not engagement with these Christian, and perhaps

Catholic, ideas.

What one sees in these two texts from the first third of the twentieth century by American authors that appear to engage with Catholicism, whether a narrative about Catholics as was the case with Cather or one told by someone who possessed at least some connection to the Church itself and containing Christian imagery in the form of Hemingway, was an approach stressing an application of the tropes and images of Catholicism in a way to convey more universal and non- particularly Catholic ideas and themes. Though these narratives may center on Catholic characters and portray their experience with the faith or frequently allude to the suffering of

Christ and his crucifixion that is central to the faith itself, they do not reflect an orientation towards the world that is particularly indicative of the Catholic experience. Because this approach was the dominant one regarding Catholicism and its role within American literature, the first half of the twentieth century did not witness the development of a truly American

Catholic literature. However, in those years of flux and change for the American Catholic that

were the mid twentieth century, writers began to produce works that were in very specific ways

Catholic texts.

The Ascendance of an American Catholic Literary Movement

The Catholic writers of the mid-twentieth century—O’Connor, Percy, Kerouac, and

Scorsese—each possessed a particular Catholic sensibility, distinctly representing something central to the experience of a Catholic especially one living in America and engaging with the world in that mid-twentieth century moment. By crafting narratives that formally and thematically reflect their Catholic worldview and sensibilities along with drawing on that aspect of their background in their work, these authors are unlike Cather and Hemingway as they strive towards fully representing and connecting to the American Catholic’s experience and establishing a unique literary movement. In particular, these Catholic writers are addressing the modern world in their work of this time, trying to discern that which is still meaningful. Much as

Catholics in America were becoming a more accepted part of the American framework and the

Church itself considered itself a part of the modern world, these Catholic authors sought to find and discern what man’s place was in the modern world and how man would engage with it.

What this establishes a particular kind of Catholic sensibility grounded in a particular historical moment in America. Catholicism and its role in influencing literature is one often seen as a universal, shared Catholic Imagination4 that persists throughout time that unifies these artists, but there is also room for this more localized and focused one, particularly in a location such as

America, where Catholicism occupies a complicated place and at a time like the mid-twentieth century when there were so much changing in and around the Church. As Lawrence

Cunningham notes, “[o]ne other metaphor, highlighted in the documents of the Second Vatican

Council, helps us to grasp more fully the historical and organic character of the Church as a community; it is the metaphor of pilgrimage […] [t]he key to thinking about pilgrimage, however, is that it is a process of going; the goal has not been reached— it is only attainable […]

[t]he Church, then, […] can be thought of as an organic community on a voyage toward a goal

(61-63). It is this idea, of the Catholic Church as the pilgrim church, that the Second Vatican

Council aimed to emphasize and the way in which the Church itself was heading in the years before the Council itself. And it is this notion of the pilgrim moving towards the goal and, as

Cunningham writes, “embrac[ing] the past in a present fashion” (122) is one that was indicative of the Catholic worldview in this midcentury moment, and particularly in America where the view of Catholicism was beginning to change.

By identifying this particular worldview and know that these concerns would be particular to American Catholic authors working in that time, we can see authors known for their engagement with the ideas of Catholicism, such as Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, as authors of their particular historical moment and not just, as Bacon writes of O’Connor,

“assigning priority to the ‘universal’ religious themes” (5) and keeping those writers in an ahistorical context. This also allows for an author such as Jack Kerouac, one primarily associated with the time and place in which he worked but not as often read as a writer for whom Catholic questions and topics were of the utmost importance, to be read as one participating and engaging with experience through the Catholic prism. This approach can be extended into the realm of film, particularly in the early and more personal films of Martin Scorsese, displaying how this was something truly shared by these Catholic creatives of the time and extended into a different medium. What we see the texts created by these authors (and auteurs in the case of Scorsese) is something that is both Catholic in that universal sense, namely an aesthetic manifestation of the

Catholic concern with the role and interplay of the past and present, one that would be particularly apropos and to which they would be attuned given what was happening in the world at that time.

This notion of uncovering the redeemable, the solid, the worthy, in the midst of the modern and present world was articulated by a French Catholic existentialist philosopher named Gabriel

Marcel, who provides a useful framework through which we can consider these issues. In his philosophical work, all of which written and published in the post-World War II world, Marcel thoroughly investigated the place of man in the modern world, a world he viewed as broken.

Marcel notes “a division in the world today” and how “this feeling of the world divided grows stronger and stronger at a time when the surface unification of the world […] appears to be proceeding apace” (Mystery of Being Vol. 1, 22). Marcel notes the modernity and progress of the world in that time, that there is unification and a way in which things have moved forward, but how the appearance of that belies the disjointed and backwards movement indicative of that time. “[W]e live today in a world at war with itself” Marcel writes, “and this state of world-war is being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in something that could be properly be described as world-suicide” (Mystery of Being Vol. 1 23). It is within this broken world that

Marcel situates and examines man as a figure moving alone within that world, describing how

“our condition in this world does remain […] that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, who cannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction,” namely the notion of an abstract understanding as

“[t]here is not, and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final high terrace to which we can climb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever” (Mystery of Being, Vol. 1 133). In this,

Marcel identifies this defining characteristic of man in the modern world as being by definition a pilgrim, itinerant, homo viator, what Walker Percy identified as “a wayfarer— like an old-

fashioned pilgrim on a serious quest” (Conversations with Walker Percy 13-14). Marcel goes on, in The Mystery of Being, Vol. 1, to write “we have thus reached a point where we can lay it down that to be in a situation and to be on the move are modes of being that cannot be disassociated from each other; are, in fact, two complementary aspects of our condition” (133-134), speaking to the pilgrim nature of man at this time, that is also indicative of the Catholic mindset in the world, particularly America, in that moment as it moved towards being more clearly defined as a

“pilgrim church” on Earth. Marcel’s sense of man’s role as being that of the pilgrim, making their way through the present to attain transcendence and the “hope” that emerges “when the temptation to despair exists” but when “this temptation is actively or victoriously overcome

(Homo Viator 30-31) calls to mind the certain notions of Augustinian thought particularly as it pertains to sin and the City of God, though not referencing Augustine of Hippo explicitly.

Marcel provides a language and terminology through which we can identify and define the things in which these midcentury American Catholic authors were engaging with. While some of these authors, such as O’Connor, who said in a 1962 letter to Maryat Lee, that she was “an old fan of [his]” and that “his Gifford lecture [that was collected and published at The Mystery of

Being] meant a lot to [her] at one time” (HB 463) and Percy, who “identif[ed] philosophically with people like Gabriel Marcel […] a philosophical Catholic existentialist” (Conversations with

Walker Percy 73), were aware of Marcel and noted his influence upon them and their thinking, the others do not appear to be specifically aware and engaging with him and thus any kind argument for Marcel’s overarching influence over all these writers would not be a tenable path to head down. However, the things Marcel identifies in his philosophical work are in many ways indicative of the changes and shifts that were occurring within the world of Catholicism at that time and thus the notions he invokes as well as the terminology he uses can be used as a way of

understanding this particular kind of Catholic sensibility that was present in American literature at that time. What each of these authors reflect, in one form or another, are notions of Marcel-ian thought, namely the brokenness of the modern world and man’s place within that modern world.

These ideas are thus commensurate with the intellectual climate for the American Catholic at that time, when there was an investigation into what the place of the Church and its ideas in the

American context, and thus would be topics that Catholics authors would engage with in their literary works.

Though all of O’Connor’s fiction is informed by Catholicism and Catholic thought, the questions Marcel raises and identifies are perhaps most apparent in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, the only short story collection published during her life. Chapter One discusses the ways in which these narratives and the presence of conflict that arises because of characters who, in the words of Marcel, subscribe to the “global abstraction” or the “surface unification” of the world, whether that come in the form of a slavish devotion towards science and extreme modernity or towards a naïve and destructively simple pious religious belief.

Through acts of violence, literal and metaphorical, that the vision is corrected in O’Connor’s fiction and thus one undertakes this journey to navigate and live in the modern and present world. As Jay Watson writes, “[t]o focus so strictly on O’Connor as a crafter of Christian parables, however, is ultimately to do a disservice to her work,” and thus a reading of these elements of O’Connor’s fiction, ones often seen as evidence of this strictly parable and universal quality of her work, as being indicative of the American Catholic experience at that time reveals an even greater degree to which she is “an incisive observer of the contemporary social, cultural, racial, and political scene in postwar America” (212).

For Percy, this conception and construction of man would persist throughout his literary career as a major and recurring idea, as being “concerned with the dislocation of man in the modern age” (Conversations With Walker Percy 11) was the topic at the heart of his work as a writer. Though he would return to this idea in all of his fiction, Percy’s first novel The

Moviegoer represents his closest engagement with the notion of man as wayfarer and pilgrim in the form of his protagonist Binx Bolling, which will be taken up in Chapter Two. Undertaking a search to transcend the everyday and mundane conditions of existence in the modern world, Binx wrestles with and navigates the modern world rather than retreating from it in one grand motion, learning to live in and discover meaning in the present world much as the Church was simultaneously trying to do in its own way.

As a writer famous (or perhaps infamous) for his travels across the country, Jack Kerouac is an author for whom the notion of pilgrimage is not alien. Though the discourse contains readings of Kerouac and his writing that emphasize this itinerant quality of his work,5 it has not addressed that this aspect of Kerouac’s fiction as being indicative of his Catholic background and the presence of that Catholicism in his approach to literature. Rather than a biographical oddity as it is often read in articles such as Richard Sorrell’s “The Catholicism of Jack Kerouac,”

Chapter Three will consider how Kerouac’s notions of pilgrimage and his construction of man, shown through the form of his main and narrating character in On The Road, Sal Paradise, reflect his Catholicism and particularly of how a Catholic living in America at that given time would view things, something that becomes apparent when one considers Kerouac’s 1963 short novel

Visions of Gerard and what it reveals about the author’s vision for his oeuvre and the Catholic presence within that.

Though producing films released after the publication of the works by O’Connor, Percy, the films of Martin Scorsese, particularly his earlier films coming from a much more personal vision such as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, engage in a consideration of man that in keeping with the conception shared by those other mid-twentieth century American Catholic authors, which will be examined in Chapter Four. Both Charlie Cappa in Mean Streets and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver represent this feeling of one who is this wayfarer in the Marcel-ian and Vatican II- era American Catholic sense, both being “God’s lonely man” as Travis describes himself.

Whether exploring these ideas in a very specifically Catholic context (the Little Italy shown in

Mean Streets) or in Taxi Driver that is removed from that ethnic context, Scorsese cinematically depicts the conflicts and questions that would be particularly relevant to the American Catholic through these narratives. Thus Scorsese stands as both the culmination and the completion of this

Vatican II American Catholic artist, as American Catholic arts and literature would move towards a much more noticeably postconciliar sensibility that did not engage as directly with these concerns. But for O’Connor, Percy, Kerouac, and Scorsese, it is by addressing these themes and this notion of man that is in keeping with their Catholic backgrounds and how they would perceive the world as American Catholics living in the mid-twentieth century, creating a school or movement of truly American Catholic artists who could finally draw upon their religious backgrounds in a full and complete way.

CHAPTER 1

FLANNERY O’CONNOR

"Struck me kinda funny, seem kinda funny sir to me. Still at the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe.” Bruce Springsteen, “Reason to Believe”

There is perhaps no author as closely linked with Catholicism in the history of American literature as Flannery O'Connor. As she describes in a letter to Elizabeth Hester dated July 20

1955, O'Connor writes "I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic." (HB 90).

Throughout her essays and letters, O'Connor's addresses the role that her Catholic belief played in the development of her aesthetics. However, while that relationship has been considered, what is lost is O’Connor’s connection to both her national context as well as with the moment in which she was living. John Sykes notes “the two polities with which [O’Connor] was constantly identified, the Roman Catholic Church and the American South” (“O’Connor and the Agrarians”

21), speaking to the ways in which she is not typically read as part of a broader American literature or one engaged in the mid-twentieth century. Rather than using her religious belief to retreat from the world in which she lived, O’Connor attempted to reconcile the past world with the present, something that is seen in her recurring conception of man as a pilgrim and in a pilgrim state. In that regard, O’Connor’s literary project was in keeping with the Second Vatican

Council, which commenced during O’Connor’s life and would be of particular note to the

American Catholic such as O’Connor.

To perform this consideration of O’Connor and her Catholic literary sensibility within the mid-twentieth century American Catholic context, one must identify what it means for O’Connor to produce literature that reflects Catholic belief. O’Connor identifies the "Catholic sacramental view of life" or the loss of "our innocence" and thus the need for "the Redemption which was

brought about by Christ's death" as what make up the core of a Catholic existence and, subsequently, her fiction reflect those tenets. "The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin," O'Connor describes in "Novelist and Believer," viewing it "not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future" (MM 167). What defines O’Connor’s characters is their fallen nature and need for redemption. O’Connor’s emphasis on this is what defines her relative to other secular authors of her time. It is out of that reality of sin and the need for redemption that O'Connor's Catholic literary aesthetic emerges as her characters "are waiting

(whether they know it or not) for God to break into a world that is otherwise petty and feckless"

(Aesthetic of Revelation 2). In a 1960 letter, O'Connor notes how "[t]here is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected" (HB 373), reflecting a conception of mankind "struggl[ing] to find our place within a broken and fallen world [...] and contemporary society's tendency to evacuate Mystery entails that we often feel lonely without God" (Middleton 307).

O'Connor also acknowledged that for most of her audience the means by which grace is restored and sin is absolved for the Catholic, the sacraments, would be foreign. Thus a sacramental view of the world, one that stresses the experience of the divine in the physical, would be easily misunderstood as well. Discussing "a novel in which the central action is a baptism," O'Connor is aware that "for a majority of [her] readers, baptism is a meaningless rite" and thus she must "see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance" with "distortion" serving as "an instrument [...] not the kind of distortion that destroys; it is the kind that reveals, or should reveal" (MM 162). As Frederick Asals notes there is "a profound need to come to terms with the

physical, to accept corporeal life, however abhorrent or painful, as the given from which there is no escape” in O’Connor’s work as “existence can only be in the body, in matter, whatever horrors that may entail" (65-66). O'Connor outlines this in "Catholic Novelists and their

Readers":

The universe of the Catholic fiction writer is one that is founded on the theological truths

of the Faith, but particularly on three of them which are basic—the Fall, the Redemption,

and the Judgment. These are doctrines that the modern secular world does not believe in.

It does not believe in sin, or in the value that suffering can have, or in eternal

responsibility […] This means frequently that he may resort to violent literary means to

get his vision across to a hostile audience, and the images and actions he creates may

seem distorted and exaggerated to the Catholic mind. (MM 185)

“O'Connor's stories typically build to a climactic image—usually that of a suffering human body—to which the rest of the story points as kind of prophetic finger," John Sykes describes, and "[t]he effect of this symbol, or tableau, is to inspire contemplation, not conversation [...]

O'Connor hopes to bring about an encounter with divine mystery that overwhelms the reader and defies comprehension" (4). The author therefore turns to "violent literary means," "shout[ing]" and "large and startling figures" (MM 34) to properly convey both the gravity of the absolution as well as the reality of experiencing it in the physical world, “provid[ing] her characters and readers with a shocking, bodily experience that would defy dualism and begin[ning] the process of spiritual growth" (Lake 128).

While O’Connor’s fiction reflects the central elements of the Catholic faith, it was clear that her intent was not to proselytize. In "The Church and the Fiction Writer," O'Connor notes how "It is generally supposed [...] that the Catholic who writes fiction is out to use fiction to

prove the truth of the Faith, or at least prove the existence of the supernatural" (MM 145) and

"for many writers it is easier to assume universal responsibility for souls than it is to produce a work of art" (MM 149). Robert Brinkmeyer Jr. notes how “[a]s a Catholic writer who saw her reading audience and the age itself as predominantly secular and without faith Flannery

O'Connor certainly felt the temptation to impose her vision monologically upon others rather than open herself in her art to dialogic encounters that would explore and enlarge her consciousness” but “she was profoundly aware that such monologism was fatal to great art, and indeed she saw much fiction by Catholic writers, particularly American Catholics, as flawed in this way" (Art and Vision 18). To be a “Catholic author” in O’Connor’s time meant to explicitly reinforce teachings and serve a kind of pastoral service for the reader, leading to what O'Connor describes as "the sorry religious novel" (MM 163).

O’Connor calls attention to the "separating [of] nature and grace as much as possible" that leads the writer into "reduc[ing] his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché" and thus can only "recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene" (MM

147). For O'Connor, a religious attitude "that promotes novenas and sentimental pieties bordering on superstition and that converts the Roman Catholic Church into the Elks Club offends her sense of faith" (Hermit Novelist 24). In turn a fiction professing to be steeped in religious thought and yet keeping the physical world and the actions of the divine radically separated would be equally offensive. "[T]he writer [who] supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality" because "the eyes of the

Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him" (MM

163) has failed in creating a work of literature that engages with religious themes. It is this which separates her from those “religious” writers of her time that produced "a distortion of sentimental

in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence [...] skipping of this process [of redemption] in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite" (MM 147-148) while O’Connor’s fiction depicted this process of redemption as it occurs in the physical world.

O’Connor’s fiction, a fiction that reflects her Catholicism, should not be understood as a retreat from the modern world. "Belief," O'Connor writes, "is the engine that makes perception operate" (MM 109) not something that hinders the perceptive act. "A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it," O'Connor describes in "The Church and the Fiction Writer," but rather "add[s] a dimension to the writer's observation [...] If the

Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is" (MM 150). Rather than preventing the writer from seeing the fullness of reality, an author’s religious belief allows for even more to be seen by the writer, providing a subtext to the text that is existence. In that regard, O’Connor differentiates herself from previous authors who have engaged with religion, particularly Catholicism, in earlier decades of the twentieth century. O'Connor thought "[t]he Catholic sacramental view of life is one that sustains and supports at every turn the vision that the storyteller must have if he is going to write fiction of any depth […] far from restricting the Catholic writer, generally provides him with more advantages" than disadvantages (MM 152), and it was that view of life that O’Connor brought to her fiction and made it Catholic. While previous authors, such as Cather in Death Comes for The

Archbishop and Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea, incorporated Catholic characters or

Catholic symbols into their fiction, that fiction was not informed by that worldview, whether it be the sacramental nature of life or man’s fallen nature and need for redemption. O’Connor circumnavigates the two poles, not engaging in sentimental pieties like her contemporary authors

who supposed to write religious literature while bringing an aesthetic explicitly derived from

Catholic belief and dogma to American literary fiction.

While O'Connor is read in this Catholic light and served a representative of the Catholic author in the American context (both through her own acclimation and from the writing of others), her fiction also portrays the South in the United States, a region that is predominantly

Protestant. "O'Connor was […] especially aware of herself as a southerner" writes Robert Coles

(xxvi) as she did not look beyond the farm of Andalusia in Milledgeville and the surrounding towns and counties of Georgia and Alabama for fictional material. O'Connor describes "[t]he great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech" (103).

O'Connor, like those other writers who share her Southern heritage, did not need to go far for material and images to be crafted into literature. “The best American fiction has always been regional," O’Connor describes in “The Regional Writer, noting "[t]he ascendancy passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South" (MM 58). O'Connor values fiction that has strong ties to a specific geographic region and thus her own work is largely situated in, and primarily read within, the context of the South. This was noted in the preliminary discussion of the author as "Many early reviews place O'Connor as a regional writer, joining Faulkner, Erskine

Caldwell, and Carson McCullers" (Fodor 22).

O'Connor made it clear how she drew upon the South for the settings and characters, describing in "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction" that she is "always having it pointed out [...] that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesman prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs" (MM 38). Rather than a fiction that is essentially

documentary in which the author "will be concerned above all with an accurate reproduction of the things that most immediately concern man," O'Connor used and drew upon the vistas and settings and people of the south to create a "kind of fiction [that] will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery" (MM 41). As an author acutely interested in the sacramental with "All of the sacraments devolv[ing] from the sacrament of the Eucharist in the

Mass, the mystery of Christ's sacrifice, death, and glorious resurrection in body achieved through the power of the Holy Spirit" ("Displaced Sacrament" 66), O'Connor and her sacramental aesthetic would lead to fiction that emphasized the mystery and depicted the mysterious. Because of the regional focus of her vision (when it came to her writing), her examinations of such great mysteries made use of people and places one might encounter in the south though putting them in unusual or unordinary situations.

When O'Connor was read apart from the Southern literary context, it was in a way that situated her in a continuum that went beyond the American context. "Early reviewers who appreciated O'Connor's religious concern often cite religious issues as evidence of her universality and insight, defending her against 'mere' regionalism" (Fodor 23) as O’Connor’s was primarily associated, when not read in the southern context, with the theological and thus more universal than national. Scholars such as Michael Kreyling note how "[t]he beatification of

O'Connor clearly sidesteps her Americanness and, just as clearly, privileges it as a doctrinal product [...] over the text as cultural process" (1) and ignore the interpretations of Jon Lance

Bacon who stressed "the centrality of her writings in the literary history of postwar America [...]

[t]he theological approach has deepened our understanding of O'Connor, but it has also excluded her from most analyses of American fiction that turn on social or political issues" (5). Save for the rare instances such as these, the consensus regarding O'Connor is that she should not be read

as a writer engaging with the American setting of her time. However, this conception of

O'Connor as an author not particularly American is overstated and at odds with the author herself. While O'Connor’s narratives are grounded in a very specific southern setting and her more thematic aims reach beyond the twentieth century American context to the theological and philosophical, her concerns where in many ways indicative of the American experience, particularly of the American Catholic. O’Connor’s Catholicism, rather than detaching her from the modern world and the American context, connected her two those things and elicited a greater engagement with them.

O'Connor's responses to the world in which she was living reflected concerns that would be characteristic of the American Catholic living at that very time, an engagement with the

American experience that is underdeveloped in the discourse surrounding her. In her letters,

O’Connor commented on how she "like[s] the way that man [John F. Kennedy] is running the country" (HB 499) and how his assassination would "take all the wind out of the sails of

Southern politics, which has been operating exclusively on a 'damn the Kennedys' basis" (HB

550). Displaying an awareness to what is transpiring on the national political scene and aligning herself with a candidate who, as a Catholic and a Northerner would elicit skepticism from most southerners since he seemed to represent modernity and the future, O'Connor's connection to the historical and political currents of the country at the time are evident. O'Connor also notes in a letter how "[t]he declaration on the Jews and on religious library seems to have gotten sidetracked at the [Vatican] council" and that she "hope[s] they manage to get it going again"

(HB 551). In her letters, O'Connor displays interest in the events of the Second Vatican Council, especially some of its more progressive and modernizing actions. “Flannery O’Connor would emerge simply as a well-informed and very perceptive pre-Vatican II laywoman, a traditional

Catholic at home in the rural Protestant South,” J. Ramsey Michaels writes “yet ready for

Vatican II and most of the changes it introduced in Catholic biblical scholarship and in the

Church” (9). As Henry T. Edmundson III notes in his recent essay on the author and the mid- twentieth century conservative thinker Russell Kirk, there is an “extent to which O’Connor’s own thought might embody dimensions of that conservative thought6” (“O’Connor, Kirk, the

Problem of Misguided Humanitarianism” 253), leading to O’Connor being cast solely as one who retreated and wholly rejected the modern world.

Though the dominant readings of O’Connor are that of a conservative or reactionary nature, isolating her within either the extremely regional with the South or placing her in a solely theological context that pushes her away from the modern or present world, O’Connor engages with that present rather than denying it, seeking to negotiate and understand the mystical and religious within that modern world. W.A. Sessions describes how "for O'Connor's fiction to have any credibility in the modern world, she had to undertake, from the beginning, a strategy without rewards, at least within the plot of the story [...] she had early recognized la rèalitè des choses in the modern world" (22) and it is this quality that is so often subverted and overlooked in our readings of O’Connor. In keeping with the moves of the Second Vatican Council, O'Connor displayed the tensions and conflict between the two but that there must be a restoration of balance. In a letter, O’Connor describes how "you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it" (HB 90), embodying in her life the tensions that she would examine in her fiction.

Richard Giannone, in Flannery O'Connor, Hermit Novelist, writes that "[a]lthough she lived and wrote in the Georgia backwoods, O'Connor grasped the horror of our time, and she boldly took them on. War (both hot and cold), concentration camps, racism, terrorism, mass

murder, infanticide, suicide, economic oppression, exile, sexism, and sheer human loneliness make up the historical and existential context of her art" (7) and thus "[i]n advance of and alongside Vatican II (1962-65), she conducts in print and by example an aggiornamento

[updating] that brought her readers and her faith into vital confrontation with the modern world"

(25). For O’Connor, this manifested itself in a focus of man's dislocation in the modern age and a conception of man’s condition as that of the pilgrim, described by the great Catholic philosopher

Gabriel Marcel as being “required to cut himself a dangerous path across the unsteady blocks of a universe which has collapsed and seems to be crumbling in every direction […] more firmly established in Being, a world whose changing and uncertain gleams are all that we can discern here below” (Homo Viator 146). However, this conception of man is not just in keeping with

O’Connor’s engagement with issues of theology and philosophy, but it also displays the way in which she was connected to the American national sensibility as it related to Catholicism’s place in the country.

Thus O’Connor’s depiction of man’s condition as being that of the pilgrim is in keeping with the experience of the American Catholic living at that time, as America was part of the new and modern world from the view of the Catholic Church hierarchy as it sought to determine its own place and emphasize its own pilgrim nature and place its status as the “pilgrim church on earth” in a more central position. As the Church and the modern world confronted one another to enable the Church to discern how it would continue to exist in the modern world, O'Connor examined this confrontation throughout her fiction, making her an author of her specific time rather than one removed from it, all while yoking it together with her Catholic worldview and sensibility. While often read as an author of the pre-Vatican II era and a steadfast protector of tradition, O'Connor "anticipat[ed] some of the dynamic thinking of Vatican II" with "characters

[...] flawed, uninformed, or sinful ones in need of a conversion as they undertake a journey—a pilgrimage, holy or otherwise. O'Connor writes about those whom many writers of her generation repressed: the mystic, the prophetic, the marginalized" (Samway 162). The tensions between the modern world and the ecclesiastical that were confronted and addressed by the

Second Vatican Council appear in O'Connor's fiction as a recurring clash between extreme modernity and overly simplified and superficial religious attitudes.

O'Connor's first short story collection, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, is comprised of stories that represent the most prominent example of the author’s engagement with these ideas. O’Connor’s first novel, Wise Blood, was published in 1952 and was a work in which she was discovering her craft and the topics she would more fully explore in her shorter fiction.

Her initial attempts to write what would eventually become Wise Blood were filled with false starts, something O'Connor identifies in her letters documenting the process. O'Connor notes

"[t]he failure of the novel" in one letter (HB 116) and, when discussing the Good Man collection, describes how it "is getting much more attention than Wise Blood and may even sell a few copies" as "the atmosphere at Harcourt, Brace, at least in regard to [O'Connor] has changed to one of eager enthusiasm" (HB 85). Both in how they were approached and received by the published, Wise Blood was merely a prologue, a beginning to something that could be more fully realized in subsequent works and beginning with the shorter fiction that would make up A Good

Man Is Hard to Find And Other Stories. As Paul Elie writes, O’Connor “reinvented herself as a writer of short fiction” (233) after Wise Blood with those stories that would be collected in A

Good Man Is Hard to Find and thus “her transformation from literary prodigy to ageless rural artist was in progress” (236) as a result of her shift toward the short story form after her first novel’s publication.

The short story form itself lends itself to the thematic work O’Connor sought to do in her writing. Kerry McSweeney notes that “a conspicuous feature of O’Connor’s signature as a creative writer is her attempt to accommodate her Christian vision within the form and conventions of the realist short story” (76-77), linking that which defines O’Connor as a literary craftsman with the short story form. Perhaps owing to her “fidelity to New Critical principles” that led to the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” being included in an edition of Cleanth

Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s textbook Understanding Fiction (McSweeney 75), the short story is the definitive literary form for O’Connor and her literary project. O’Connor’s stories are

"jewels of formalist structure, modern-day Christian parables situated in the manners of Southern life that generate the internal paradoxes and ironic contrasts so important to New Critical analysis" (Bosco 52), unified in a collection that O’Connor described as "stories about original sin" (HB 74), a collection thematically unified though featuring a variety of stories and characters calling to mind collections in American literary history like Sherwood Anderson's

Winesburg, Ohio and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. O’Connor’s stories fit together and

"[t]he collection clearly deserves consideration as a short story cycle" (O'Gorman 180) as it centers around themes and ideas, particularly that of original sin, "dramatiz[ing] this human mystery by grounding the protagonists in its haunting exposés of pride" (Kilcourse 125), and the pilgrimage that man must make to atone of that original sin.

Michael Raiger emphasizes this connection between the short story form and O’Connor’s thematic (specifically those Catholic themes) in his essay “‘Large and Startling Figures’: The

Grotesque and the Sublime in the Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor” as he writes “[t]he short stories of Flannery O’Connor can be read per the tropology of medieval biblical exegesis” (246).

The shorter and abbreviated form of the short story (as compared to the novel) mirrors the use of

allegory in the Middle Ages to interpret events depicted in the Bible (particularly on the tropological or “moral” level) and thus O’Connor’s stories are “allegorical not as an abstraction of moral character personified, but in the scriptural sense, as the literal disclosed symbolically through the grotesque and the analogical revealed negatively through the sublime” (267). The short story form is particularly apropos for O’Connor’s more religious and theologically motivated fiction and thus a focus on her stories, particularly those collected in the only short story collection that was published during O’Connor’s life, when considering the ways in which her religious sensibilities and focus were intertwined in her identity as an American author is apropos. These specific stories, covering both her most-anthologized along with those

(particularly in the case of “A Stroke of Good Fortune”) that are not as often considered, are also those that make the conception of pilgrimage and the condition of the pilgrim most apparent, particularly by foregrounding literal and metaphorical journeys in the narratives of the stories themselves.

Throughout A Good Man Is Hard to Find And Other Stories, O’Connor repeatedly presents a conception of man’s condition as that of the pilgrim, navigating the path that is the present world while trying to make their way to their ultimate goal and end. For O’Connor, this manifests itself in the recurring role that roads and travel play in stories such as the ones upon which I will focus, but it also appears in the tensions that emerge because of either a turn towards an atheistic embracing of modernity or a belief in a superficial and unsubstantial religious system. By presenting man in this way, O’Connor is engaging with those concerns that would be relevant to the American Catholic author living and working during the age of the Second

Vatican Council, that time leading up to its convocation through its closing. Though the stories discussed here predate much of the Council, the ideas O’Connor illuminates are indicative of the

sensibility that would ultimately manifest itself in the discussions performed by the Council and the resulting changes and clarifications to the Catholic faith. By highlighting this quality in

O’Connor’s short fiction, the interplay between the author’s noted religiously influenced literary aesthetic and the historical moment in which she worked becomes much more apparent and thus we can understand O’Connor and her Catholic literary sensibility as one reflecting the moment in which she wrote.

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

The titular story of O'Connor's collection portrays her conception of man's condition as a pilgrim in the modern world through the family’s travel and the grandmother’s metaphorical journey towards an understanding at which she arrives after confronting the specter of mortality through an act of violence. The grandmother does not acknowledge her pilgrim condition, instead placing her faith in a bland substitute of unsubstantial religious pieties and a sense of the civility and propriety, but realizes her pilgrim nature when made to confront her own mortality.

In the grandmother, O’Connor presents a character out of balance and who does not grasp the precarious path than one must tread in the modern world, relying on an adherence to quasi-

Christian pieties melded together with a materialist notion of high and low class, but who recognizes her actual nature amid a violent confrontation as is the case in so much of O’Connor’s work.

At the outset of the story, the grandmother places a great deal of faith in appearances, propriety, and order rooted in what amounts to the superficial. The way the grandmother comports herself in the car with her family reflects this, as O'Connor describes "her white cotton gloves" along with "a navy blue sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy

blue dress with a small white dot in the print [...] collars and cuffed were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet" so that if "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady" (CSS

118). "Following in Southern genteel fashion, [the grandmother] dons the costume of her station," Jordan Cofer writes (53), which O'Connor contrasts with the family's mother who "still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief" (CSS 118), having not changed her manner of dress from the day before as well as dressing in a way that would not be befitting of a lady in the grandmother's conception of the term. The grandmother places stock in these simple notions of goodness, propriety, and manners, saying that "she would have done well to marry" a different man "because he was a gentleman [...] and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man" (CSS 120). Wealth, prestige, notions of being a lady and a gentleman, it is from this that the grandmother derives her notion of goodness and thus, as Farrell O'Gorman describes, "The Grandmother does have a sense that the region and the modern world are decaying [but] she does not see that fault might lay in the South itself and its amoral complicity with a self-satisfied consumerism" (181). The grandmother believes the world around her is in a state of decay and disrepair owing to movement away from those values of propriety that are central to that character and how she presents herself.

Red Sammy, the proprietor of the restaurant where the family stops for lunch amid their car trip, articulates this sense of things when he says "[a] good man is hard to find [...]

[e]verything is going terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlashed. Not no more" (CSS 122). This idea of the simpler and safer past, where people are good and polite, reflects the grandmother’s sensibilities and values. “[T]he Grandmother is a proper lady who would gladly reduce Christian faith to sociology or culture or personality

development,” Ralph Wood describes, “if, in doing so, she could save her own life. She proves to be a good Christian atheist” (Christ-Haunted South 38), hinting at the things that the grandmother values and how that would be, in O’Connor’s conception, something unsubstantial7.

It is reducing one’s religious life and experience, the most important of qualities in O’Connor’s eyes, down to something unsubstantial like manners or behavior. The grandmother eschews this religious sensibility that comes along with an acknowledgment of one’s true nature, namely that of the pilgrim navigating this world, and fills that space and definition with this hybrid of a secular propriety and banal and trite Christian sentiment. The grandmother does not reject religion (and thus it is not simply a matter of her unbelief leading her astray) but rather that she has reduced her belief to a code of conduct, extracting the mystery that O’Connor values, and used it as a means of establishing a social hierarchy. It is that specific notion of "good" in which the grandmother and Red Sammy believe and its centrality to the grandmother that makes this short story into a "critique of contemporary regional self-perception" (O'Gorman 181) through the grandmother’s alignment with the manners and quasi-aristocratic nature of the South and southern life.

While the grandmother of the story placed her faith in what can be understood as superficial or impermanent things, her encounter with The Misfit highlights the unsustainability of those convictions. As the Misfit and his gang drive to the site of the accident caused by the grandmother, the elderly woman cries out "[y]ou're The Misfit! I recognized you at once!" to which the Misfit replies "Yes'm [...] but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me" (CSS 127). As the other members of the Misfit's gang takes away the other members of the family to be shot, the grandmother pleads with the Misfit to spare her, saying "you wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" and that "I know you're a good man. You don't

look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!" (CSS 127), making appeals based on those notions of class stratification and being from good stock,

"tr[ying] to cope with exposure through the banalities that have served her all her life, but this time she cannot pull a fast one" (Mystery of Love 49).

As her family is systematically killed and the Misfit keeps the gun, both literally and metaphorically, pointed at her, the grandmother’s demeanor begins to change. "[T]he grandmother's head cleared for an instant" O'Connor writes and the old woman says to the Misfit

"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" while "reach[ing] out and touched him on the shoulder" (CSS 132). Confronting her own mortality through this encounter with that man who would kill her, the grandmother is forced to realize her common humanity with the Misfit and all that he represents and a "redemptive power arises from the grandmother's femininity" (Reesman 49) through a maternal instinct she had not displayed thus far in the story.

This act of maternal love prompts a violent reaction from the Misfit, who "sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest" (CSS 132). The grandmother’s realization and change in those final moments, one brought on by a confrontation with actual life-and-death, appears outwardly as her body "half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under here like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky" (CSS 132).

This outward expression of happiness and innocence, the smile and legs crossed like a child would, reflects the end of this journey toward an understanding of how once must live in the present world. John Sykes describes "a death such as the grandmother's" in O’Connor’s story as

"kind of Eucharist in reverse" with "her violated body becomes the means whereby she is mysteriously united with Christ's grace as she repeats his suffering" (Aesthetic of Revelation 42).

Much as the Eucharist is a transformative experience for the Catholic, restoring the believer to a

state of grace through this remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice, the grandmother is affected as well as she "loses her earthly life, but in the last moment when she renounces her individualism, she may also be finding spiritual life" (Hooten 200).

The Misfit mentions to his gang how the grandmother "would of been a good woman [...] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (CSS 133) as "with a gun pointed at her head, her false faith and piety evaporate and she finally sees clearly" (Cofer 61).

Through her appeal of maternal love and connection, something lacking that arrives by the presence of mortality in the form of the criminal’s gun, the grandmother offers The Misfit "a chance to move out of his pain by the old lady, who gives up her own meanness in an unexpected act of compassion [whch] causes the Misfit nothing but pain" (Leigh 371). The Misfit, representing a nihilism or atheistic thinking with his assertion that “Jesus […] thrown everything off balance” (CSS 132) by raising the dead, cannot process this compassion the grandmother exhibits in reaching out to him both literally and metaphorically and reacts with violence. John

Sykes describes how "The human body is the site at which our salvation must be worked out" and that "suffering is good, not evil, as long as suffering is identified with the redemptive suffering of Christ [...] violence in O'Connor is cruciform [...] without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin [...] suffering offers the opportunity for the human being to fully participate with Christ in the salvation of the world" (Aesthetic of Revelation 42), which the grandmother experiences and leads to her redemption. Being led astray by this reduced and minimalized religious belief, the grandmother has subverted and denied her human condition as that of the pilgrim. It is only by understanding that, displayed in her act of maternal love toward the Misfit, that allows her to be restored to a state of grace. In this we see a most American of quandaries, particularly as seen by the American Catholic like O’Connor. This reduction of

religious belief to being a sociology or lifestyle both creates an overly simplified Christianity while also making it something closer to unbelief rather than true belief in O’Connor’s eyes. In that regard, the grandmother represents the two polarities that one must avoid, those two things that elicit a denial of man’s pilgrim condition.

"The River"

The figure of the pilgrim in O’Connor’s short story "The River" is the young boy named

Harry Ashfield. By documenting his day spent with the babysitter who takes him to a healing at the river and thus exposes him to a religious way of life and sensibility, O'Connor explores the tensions between modern life and the acceptance of something beyond that reaches into the metaphysical and religious. But how Harry comes to learn about these things, through a crude and reductive fundamentalism, leads him to a violent end in the search for the divine as

O’Connor gives us a glimpse of what a more fundamental and less thoughtful religious sensibility leads us. “It is evident,” Ralph C. Wood writes, “that O’Connor presents her readers with two antithetical worlds, both of them noxious” (“Scandalous Baptism” 193) in this story and sets her pilgrim representative in the midst of them to be forced to navigate those two sides.

O’Connor is showing, through the innocence of Harry, the modern human (and particularly the modern American) navigating the extremes of modern life as they struggle to express and act upon their innate spiritual longings.

The Ashfield's home possesses a modern quality, with a watercolor and phonograph in the front room while his mother in "a toneless voice called from the bedroom" for "an ice-pack"

(CSS 158). It is a life that is urbane as well as austere, mirrored in the empty and unaffected sound of the mother's voice. Carolyn Kerr notes how Mrs. Ashfield's state at the beginning of the

story reflects "the more serious ailment of her empty materialism [...] liv[ing] in a godless world"

(83), an empty materialism that extends to the home itself. Mrs. Ashfield is indicative of this as we first encounter her as she is in the bedroom, not visible nor physically present, as she requests an icepack for the hangover afflicting her. Mrs. Ashfield's maternal instincts are diminished as well as Harry "didn't have time to be hungry yet then" (CSS 159) and thus was not fed before he left the house. "Although Harry lives with the couple who are physically responsible for his birth and welfare, his parents do not emotionally live with him," Richard Giannone writes, and "[t]hey inhabit a solipsistic temple elsewhere that is dedicated to their god of pleasure" (Hermit Novelist

92), a "temple" that is clean and austere and clearly modern.

By contrast, the Connin's home that Harry goes to after leaving "was two rooms and two porches" with one "part kitchen and part bedroom" and "filled with pictures and calendars" (CSS

160). Timothy Basselin writes of how "[t]he home in the city, full of life and art and parties, is mechanical and dead, while the other home, at the edge of town with only two rooms and multiple children, brims with being and mystery" (66), with the separation in the Ashfield home while the Connin's home is cluttered and an open space. "The setting and the characters are mundane," Lila Meeks writes, "but the emphasis and the tone may awaken the reader to something mysterious, something mystical and holy" (20). In "O'Connor's humorous portrayal of dialectically opposed worlds—the urban wasteland of Harry's family life and tbe rural, religious home of his babysitter. Mrs. Connin," Mark Bosco writes, "Harry is a mere afterthought in his parents' lives and looks forward to an adventurous day away from them. Mrs. Connin sets him on a new course of discovery, culminating in his baptism at the river by the preacher" (56). On his way to the baptism, Harry thinks of how "You found out more when you left where you lived.

He had found out already this morning that he had been made by a carpenter named Jesus Christ.

Before he had thought it had been a doctor name Sladewell" (163). The clash between his initial and modern conception of himself, having been brought into this world by a doctor, and the religiously inflected view brought about by his time at the Connin's home as "Mrs. Connin teach[es] Harry the most rudimentary of lessons—that he is not the accidental product of an unsponsored and undirected natural process" ("Scandalous Baptism" 193). Harry’s response to this, clinging to these religious notions reflects man’s inherent religious desires and longing.

Hearing the preacher preach about "the River of Life, made out of Jesus' Blood [...] the River of

Faith [...] the River of Life [...] the River of Love" (CSS 165) Harry is quick to realize that

"[w]here he lived everything was a joke" but that "this was not a joke" (CSS 167) but something serious and life-altering. John Desmond notes how "true joy is a gift frequently bestowed on lonely children [...] given a glimpse of the 'true country' in which they 'count,' spiritually, and are loved" ("Stalking Joy" 106) and that is what is given to Harry by the preacher through baptism.

However, while Harry’s experience with Mrs. Connin awaken this spiritual longing within him, the specific religious instruction that he receives is crude and in many ways, reductive. What the Connin home offers Harry is a fundamentalist understanding of religion, not as desiccated and de-spiritualized as that of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” but still in some ways imperfect. The literalness at which the preacher describes the baptism, saying to the congregants “don’t be thinking this is the last of it because this old red river don’t end here. This old red suffering stream goes on […] slow to the Kingdom of Christ” (CSS 166).

Harry believes that he “won’t go back to the apartment” but that he will “go under the river”

(CSS 168), where he believes the Kingdom of Christ is after his baptism in the river. Whether owning to the simplicity of the child’s worldview or to this more literal and fundamental religious sensibility that Harry picks up on, his understanding of these things are overly

simplified. In “A Closer Walk with Thee: Flannery O'Connor and Southern Fundamentalists,”

Robert Brinkmeyer describes how O’Connor was “an intellectual who felt close in spirit to fundamentalist fanatics, a fierce breed of anti-intellectuals” but also noting how the author “did not reject out-and-out intellectual pursuits, but rather endorsed a healthy skepticism of the adventures of the mind […] push[ing] as violently as she could against the modern age, all the time struggling not to let her vision slide off into the polemic” (12-13), a dilemma played out in this story as Harry does receive that religious experience that combats modernity but in an underdeveloped way that is not subject to the rigors and considerations that come with true and lasting religious belief.

The tension between newly awakened religious sensibility in Harry and the secular and modern life that his parents have created for him are apparent when Mrs. Connin returns Harry home. Finding the Ashfield's in the midst of entertaining, the babysitter tells Harry's parents that the preacher Bevel "baptized this child this morning," to which his mother replies "Well the nerve!" (CSS 169). Mrs. Connin views Harry's family with a similar incredulousness, "icily" telling his mother they asked the preacher to pray for Harry's mother to be "healed" of her

"affliction" (CSS 169), which turned out to be nothing more than a hangover from overindulging the night before. Ralph Wood writes of how "The cultured Ashfield world is one dimensional; it is sealed off in a self-satisfaction that virtually nothing can penetrate. The Connin world, by contrast, is richly complicated and full of surprising promise" (“Scandalous Baptism” 193), creating a great deal of distrust and skepticism in terms of how one views the other. Whether in

Mr. Ashfield sarcastically quipping that "healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive" or only seeing the copy of "The Life of Jesus Christ For Readers Under Twelve" Harry took from Mrs. Connin as being "valuable" and "a collector's item" (CSS 170), Harry's parents exhibit a modern

skepticism towards these religious customs as the family's "humor merely piles the unserious atop the unserious, so that they surround themselves with meaninglessness" (Gentry 95). "The

Ashfields, like many Americans, have moved to the city and become lost souls. They are alienated from nature and from God. They are too self-indulgent, self-absorbed, and self- centered to realize the stultifying effect their vacuous, hallow existence has on young Harry"

(Meeks 20) and while Mrs. Ashfield views Bevel as "that dolt of a preacher," for Harry this encounter has initiated him. Noticing his mother's "bitter breath," Harry is "not the same now" and "count[s]" (CSS 171) as a result of his encounter with the preacher at the river.

Realizing that his life with his family is disconnected from this spiritual source, Harry sets out to return to that world, one that he quite specifically associates with the river. Harry eats

"two crackers spread with anchovy paste, that he found on the coffee table" and "drank some ginger ale left in a bottle" (CSS 171), fending for himself and piecing together a meal from the scraps and remnants of the party from the previous night as his parents are still asleep and cannot prepare a meal for him. O’Connor again emphasizes the inhuman qualities of the Ashfields’ life, as "the apartment was silent except for the faint humming of the refrigerator" (CSS 171), the only sound that fills this apartment is that of a machine working and even that sound is soft and faint as "His parents' overindulgence pollutes the air, which he inhales as a judgment against him"

(Hermit Novelist 96). Harry is so moved by his experience with the preacher, seeing the irreligious life of his family, that he "intended not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river" (CSS

173). That Harry would be so entranced and interesting in this baptismal act, and why O'Connor would place this sacrament at the heart of this story, is addressed by Timothy Basselin who notes that "baptism works as a metaphor for the need to put to death our modern ways of being in the

world" (67). Baptism stands as something that can address, in Harry's mind, that which plagues him and his life and that O'Connor offers in this context as a metaphorical addressing of those things that plague the modern world and modern reader.

Once he reaches the river, Harry "put his head under the water at once and pushed forward" (CSS 173), pushing himself down until "he was overcome with surprise: then since he was moving quickly and knew that he was getting somewhere, all his fury and fear left him"

(CSS 174). O'Connor "focuses, in fact, on the single act requiring the sharpest moral and religious assessment: the rite of initiation into Christian existence as either the ultimate reality or the ultimate delusion [...] mak[ing] Harry Ashfield's altered allegiance as scandalous and objectionable as possible, so the readers will be compelled to make a dire decision about the boy's baptism and death" ("Scandalous Baptism" 190), using the shocking and arresting image to command the reader's attention. "O'Connor suggests that the young Harry Ashfield's drowning is a spiritual encounter of baptism and the reader is startled by any staid associations he or she might have about its significance for Christian life" (Bosco 56) as O'Connor conveys the sacramental reality of an act like baptism to an audience that does not grasp its importance. Thus the author must make these notions "apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and starling figures" (MM 34). George Kilcourse describes how "The tragedy of 'The River' is not only the death of a child but the greater tragedy that he has suffered in a world mired in the effects of original sin. Harry-Bevel is offered no alternatives" (138), stressing both the shocking and tragic death of a child but also what

O'Connor is saying about man's condition and need for redemption.

The image of a child drowning, specifically one trying to drown, is perhaps one of the most shocking images that could be used and thus commands our attention, allowing O'Connor

in turn to convey the reality of baptism and the "death" of the old self that occurs, echoed in

Ralph Wood's asserting that "O'Connor makes Harry Ashfield's altered allegiance as scandalous and objectionable as possible, so the readers will be compelled to make a dire decision about the boy's baptism and death—whether they are fraudulent and enslaving or else truthful and freeing

[...] O'Connor makes the boy's entry to eternal life both violent and uncouth" ("Scandalous

Baptism" 190-191). We also might understand the pilgrimage Harry undergoes as indicative of both a rejection of the modern and urbane life represented by his parents, but also a "scathing critiques of fundamentalist religion [...] reveal[ing]the dangers of embracing an emotion-charged ritual without proper preparation. Religion itself, O'Connor seems to have been saying in this story, can be a closed, paralyzed world which devours the outsider, particularly one who comes in innocence seeking a true community, as does the child Bevel" (Woman, Thinker, Visionary

125). While O'Connor does point toward a religious answer to the calamities that exist in the modern world, it is not an absolute or fundamentalist answer seen through the arresting image of

Harry's death. The fundamentalizing is what O'Connor rejects, what Jordan Cofer identifies as "a familiar theme within O'Connor's corpus: the polarity of absolutes" (60). That polarity is displayed in "The River," and that polarity that the human in the modern world must navigate as part of their pilgrim condition.

"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

O'Connor's exploration of man's pilgrim condition continues in "The Life You Save May

Be Your Own." The road, along with the car—the means by which one road of pilgrimage in the modern context—are placed at the center of the story. O’Connor examines both the detrimental influence of modernity, in the form of the automobile Shiftlet lusts after, in its perceived ability

make man not in need of divine grace. O’Connor’s presents Shiftlet as someone who believes he can escape his fallen nature through the power of the automobile and the technology it represents. However, it is only through the unknowing and simplistic thinking of the mother that

Shiftlet is able to manipulate this situation in such a way he can acquire the car. Again,

O’Connor presents these two sides, the overly simplistic and reductive and the atheistic and overly reliant on modernity, the two poles and pulls that the modern subject must navigate in between and strike a balance between the two.

O’Connor’s conception of man’s condition as that of the pilgrim in this story comes in part from the emphasis on the road and traveling, doing so from the story’s beginning as

Shiftlet's emerges "at an amble" coming "up [Mrs. Crater's] road" and is referred to as "a tramp"

(CSS 145), carrying with him the burden of physical disability with "[h]is left coat sleeve [...] folded up to show there was only had an arm [...] his gaunt figure listed slightly to the side as if the breeze were pushing him" (CSS 145). Shiftlet enters the story as one at a clear deficiency and possessing an imperfection or ailment that needs to be overcome, an "understand[ing] that he cannot be known by his body parts" (Basselin 60) and "to become an ultimately free spirit that is not bound by his body or by any body" (Lake 94). Timothy Basselin writes of how O’Connor

“hold[s] up a mirror to her readers’ own sin and weakness […] break[ing] through cultural facades of strength and lay[ing] bare the human soul’s deformities” using “a visible metaphor for a non-visible deficit […] us[ing] disability with great precision to accomplish her task” (33), which we can see in the character of Shiftlet, physically deficient in a way that echoes man’s deficiency in a state of sin. It is in the hopes of finding the means to transcend and overcome that aspect of his nature that Shiftlet comes to the Crater's home.

What catches Shiftlet's eye at the Crater’s home, after his "pale sharp glance had already passed over everything in the yard" including "the pump near the corner of the house and the big fig tree that three or four chickens were preparing to roost in," is "a shed where he saw the square rusted back of an automobile" (CSS 146). Sarah Gordon notes how Shiftlet "singles out the car as the primary object of his interest" (171) when arriving at the farm, displaying his "positive, unconscious use of the grotesque involves his association of the spirit with a car" (Gentry 113) as he divides body and spirit fully into two camps, saying "The body [...] is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit [...] is like a automobile: always on the move" (CSS 152). "For Shiftlet,"

Roger Casey writes, "the automobile is the locus for transformative possibility, the answer to his prayer for a means of escape" (101), and he sees his opportunity to claim the freedom lucking within the space of the Crater home.

While Shiftlet sees his opportunity to overcome his disabilities in the form of the automobile and the autonomy it affords him, Mrs. Crater proposes a salvation through the innocence and companionship of her daughter, Lucynell. Lucynell is characterized by her simplicity, "an innocent woman [...] one that can't talk [...] or use foul language" (CSS 151) and is portrayed as a child whether "watching [Shiftlet] through a triangular door she had made in her overturned hair" (CSS 149) or "having a fit [...] stamping her feet and screaming" (CSS 151) that keeps her from being seen as "nearly thirty" but much younger as " her innocence” made it

“impossible to guess" (CSS 151) her actual age. Mrs. Crater "suggests that Lucynell's disabilities make her particularly suited to be a good wife" resisting a view "in which Lucynell represents the kind of biological 'trash' that threatens the social order" (Arant 83). Lucynell represents something prelapsarian, indicative of the world that existed before sin. A "connection of the young Lucynell to qualities of mediation, angelic presence, and vulnerability," all of which

"echoes biblical descriptions of the Holy Spirit" (Karnes 125) is made and thus this innocence that she alone possesses is cast in a divine light, or that the divine can be experienced through it.

The colors O'Connor associates with Lucynell, whether "in a short blue organdy dress" (CSS

145) with "long pink-gold hair and eyes as blue as a peacock's neck" (CSS 146) and "rosy-faced"

(CSS 150) or later "dressed up in a white dress [...] and there was a Panama hat on her head with a bunch of red wooden cherries on the brim" (CSS 153), reflects both a purity as well as vitality and vibrancy that would be preempted in a world without sin and death. Sarah Gordon discusses how "Lucynell's innocence [...] is a mysterious gift" and that character's "importance in this story depends on our understanding the idea of purity, a purity analogous to that of the Virgin, who, we note, is usually associated with the color blue" (172-173). By contrast, Shiftlet, the considerably less pure and innocent character, appears in more muddled colors, wearing "a black town suit and a brown felt hat" (CSS 145), ones associated with the earthy existence and toiling that would occur in a postlapsarian world. Richard Giannone notes how "O'Connor portrays

Shiftlet the despiser of life" and that the author in turn presents "in Lucynell a hint of sprouting life amid desiccation" (Hermit Novelist 70-71), reflecting where each stand relative to sinfulness and purity. "Mr. Shiftlet and Mrs. Crater are a fine match [..] meet[ing] like foxes, sly, guarded, pointed for the kill," as the mother's "self-interest is so plain, her machinations as would-be mother-of-the-bridge so shameless" (Mystery of Love 55) while Shiftlet's own self-interest the automobile and it as a way of escaping his limited physical body, as Giannone identifies the fatal flaw in Mrs. Crater, namely her desire for a normal family life for her daughter.

Shiftlet thus manipulates Mrs. Crater, who is "ravenous for a son-in-law" (CSS 150) and wholly subject to this simplified conception of life, to offer "a permanent house and a deep well and the most innocent girl in the world" since "there ain't any place in the world for a poor

disabled friendless drifting man" (CSS 152) with Lucynell functioning as "collateral in their negotiations over the car" until "[f]inally, [Shiftlet] agrees to marry Lucynell, not because Mrs.

Crater has persuaded him, but because he has acquired her automobile, which becomes the means of his escape" (Arant 83). Shiftlet tells Mrs. Crater that he "wouldn't marry no woman that

[he] couldn't take on a trip like she was somebody [...] unless I could take her to hotel and giver something good to eat" (CSS 152), seizing this opportunity and preying upon her desire to construct a “normal” domestic life for her daughter to gain control over the automobile he restored in exchange for room and board at their home.

As they head out on their honeymoon and stop at a roadside diner to eat, Lucynell falls asleep at the counter as Shiftlet tells the busboy she was a "hitchhiker" and that he "can't wait" and leaves her there (CSS 155). "O'Connor uses the automobile most often as an image of complete personal freedom—freedom from the past, freedom from responsibility, freedom even from God" (Ragen 55) and now that Shiftlet has achieved this freedom through whatever means necessary he believes he is whole again, recalling Hazel Motes' assertion in Wise Blood that

"[n]obody with a good car needs to be justified" (113). Davis Leigh notes how Shiftlet is a "most vicious exploiter [...] who tricks the Lucynell Craters, both mother and daughter, by a false marriage and by stealing their automobile" (370), manipulating both to free himself from the limits of his disabled body.

The story's end reflects Shiftlet’s continuing need for salvation, for "[t]hough Shiftlet, like the car, has metaphorically gotten a new coat of paint, he still has the same rusted interior"

(Casey 100). After abandoning Lucynell, Shiftlet "was more depressed than ever" and thought that "a man with a car had a responsibility to others [...] he kept his eye out for a hitchhiker"

(CSS 155), eventually coming across one. Ross Labrie describes how "Shiftlet is unaccountably

restless when he should be buoyant [...] he seeks goodness and therefore content with being—an escape from his own emptiness—in picking up the hitchhiker" (217). While making idle chatter with the hitchhiker, Shiftlet uses an appellation to describe his mother that was also used regarding Lucynell by a busboy at the diner where he abandoned her, referring to her as an

"angel of God." It is this phrase that incites a violent and profane reaction from the hitchhiker, saying "My old woman is a flea bag and yours is a stinking pole cat" before "he flung the door open and jumped out with his suitcase into the ditch" (CSS 156). With "Lucynell [as] a messenger," through this phrase initially ascribed to her, "Shiftlet experiences the pain of his own tricks [...] the delusions of his self-will" (Hermit Novelist 71-72). Because it is this phrase associated with Lucynell that leads to Shiftlet’s experience with transformative grace, the innocence and religious simplicity associated with the character can be seen as the cause of this moment. "In this comic reversal, Mr. Shiftlet's hypocrisy is hurled back at him" Sarah Gordon notes, and thus Shiftlet must confront that his "means of mobility and escape will eventually fail him, as our carnal bodies will fail us all" (172, 174).

O’Connor describes how affected Shiftlet was by this, " so shocked that for about a hundred feet he drove along slowly with the door still open" before eventually crying out "Oh

Lord [...] Break forth and wash the slime form this earth!" which is promptly followed by "a guffawing peal of thunder from behind and fantastic raindrops [...] crashed over the rear of Mr.

Shiftlet's car" (CSS 156). "As if in answer to his prayer, the storm descends on Shiftlet himself"

(Ragen 103), a scene that can be understood as another, though less extreme than in "The River," baptismal. While Shiftlet turned towards the modern, namely the automobile, as a way of escaping his disability and in O’Connor’s conception is inherently sinful nature because of his humanity, through the shocking interaction with the hitchhiker Shiftlet experiences the grace of

God and the correction that occurs. Sarah Gordon notes how "Shiftlet's car is shaded by the turnip-shaped cloud just as his life in the flesh is shadowed by sin and guilt" (176), the external scene serving as a reminder of Shiftlet’s spiritual condition, and thus with the coming of the rain after Shiftlet’s lamentation that J. Ramsey Michaels refers to as "[n]othing less than an exorcism" (122), the setting mirrors and displays the expiation of sin that has occurred and the restoration of grace. O’Connor presents those two extremes that one, particularly the American, had to navigate between, oversimplification and overreliance on modernity. Shiftlet displays the belief in technology and man’s own work as a way of addressing mankind’s spiritual needs while

Mrs. Crater displays an overly simplistic belief in the form of her desire for her daughter

Lucynell to be married, leaving her unaware of the manipulation performed by Shiftlet to prey upon that simplicity. Too great a turn towards either yields disastrous consequences as it is only though a more authentic engagement with the religious that one can experience the expiation of sin and the achievement of grace.

"A Stroke of Good Fortune"

In "A Stroke of Good Fortune," O’Connor depicts man’s condition as pilgrim through the character of Ruby Hill. At the outset of the story, Ruby makes it clear she rejects the simple and bucolic existence of the country from which she came. Ruby sees herself as "the only one in her family had been different, who had had any get" as she "married Bill B. Hill, a Florida man who sold Miracle Products, and had come to live in the city" (CSS 96). The thing that separates Ruby from her family is her motivation to leave Pitman, her hometown, and start a life in the more cosmopolitan city. Ruby and Bill rejected the trappings of the country life, showing in their dietary habits as they "hadn't eaten collard greens," a food traditionally associated with poorer

and more rural sections of the south, "in five years " (CSS 95), with the only occasion to eat them was the visit of her brother, who did not reject the country life as she had. "Rufus would have been in Pitman" if it had still been there as he "was like the other children" (CSS 96) without that same motivation or drive. Ruby’s “disappointment in her brother exposes [her] propensity to judge others," George Kilcourse writes, and this keeps her "blind […] to her own barren life"

(144-145). That barren quality is, to some degree, cultivated by Ruby as she wonders "how [her] sisters stood" having multiple children and "always going to the doctor to be jabbed at with instruments" (CSS 97). Richard Giannone describes how "Pregnancy and childbirth terrify Ruby, who feels that ignorance trapped her mother and two sisters [...] Pregnancy to Ruby means being subject to physical assaults that rob her of her femaleness, youth, and freedom. Pregnancy is pain, and Ruby wants to avoid pain by controlling her body" (Hermit Novelist 73).

O’Connor depicts Ruby’s linking motherhood and the stultifying life that keeps those like her mother and sisters trapped, either in the same location or in their simple lives. Trying to differentiate herself from her family, Ruby seeks what she thinks is a better life, particularly one that is better for its convenience. As Ruby struggles up her apartment’s stairs, occasionally dabbling in "gory thinking" (CSS 99) by considering that there might be something seriously wrong with her, she does not view it as a completely bad thing since a fortune teller told her she would have "a long illness" but that "[i]t will bring [her] a stroke of good fortune" (CSS 96). For

Ruby, this good fortune must mean moving "to be in a subdivision [...] where you had your drugstores and grocery and a picture show right in your own neighborhood" as opposed to having to "walking eight blocks to the main business streets and father than that to get to a supermarket" (CSS 97). Both the faux spiritual nature of the fortune teller than Ruby consults along with the assumption that any good fortune must be rooted in a material gain reflect Ruby’s

status as one who has denied that the human’s condition is that of the pilgrim navigating in between. "Ruby emphasize[s] here the premium she places on convenience" (Haddox 6) as she

"lusts after the prestige" such a life "symbolizes" (Kilcourse 144). Ruby’s denial of her pilgrim condition is contextualized by O’Connor within the mid-twentieth century American landscape, with "the story as a product of the immediate post-World War II era, when new suburban developments in the United States, thanks to increased ownership of automobiles and government incentives toward the automobile industry, were proliferating at unprecedented rates" (Haddox 5).

It is not just that Ruby strives for these goods and a home that would represent the apotheosis of success at that time but that they would allow her to live an unburdened life without any restraints or need for anyone beside herself. O’Connor situates Ruby within a culture becoming more focused on self-sufficiency to the point of self-absorption, to the point where this way of life leads to a denial of the religious dimension in one’s life and that which it can address.

Ruby's self-absorption continues to her own body and health as she claims "She had done all right doctoring herself all these years" (CSS 98) and avoiding the doctor for any reason, connects to this in a way as the character "can rationalize away anything people say" (Mystery of Love 58) and wishes "to avoid pain by controlling her body" (Hermit Novelist 73). Ruby hopes to eradicate any connection between her and other people8 or the need for others to get through her life, something that was possible in the mid twentieth century in America for perhaps the first time.

Rather than having this “stroke of good fortune” be the prestige and material gain she believes will separate her from where she came from, Ruby must confront the fact it is something she would not want nor expect. Stopping in Laverne Watts' apartment as she makes

her way of the stairs, her neighbor notes that Ruby is "swagging out that stomach of [hers]" (CSS

104) and "began to sing in a loud guttural voice [...] 'MOTHER! MOTHER!'" (CSS 104), putting together what Ruby cannot (or will not) and that her illness and physical struggles are due to her being pregnant. Ruby protests, saying that "Bill Hill's been taking care of that," namely contraception, but Laverne replies the "old Bill Hill slipped up about four or five months ago"

(CSS 104) and comments that she is "swollen all over" (CSS 105). Aimee Wilson notes the

“connect[ing]" between "Bill, his Miracle Products, and the ability to leave Pitman" as Ruby's belief that "that the only way to move away from the deadening and disappearing lifestyle that

Pitman represents is to get outside the deadly cycle of unwanted pregnancy that afflicted Ruby's mother, Bill's contraceptives would indeed seem miraculous [...] offer[ing] Ruby her own fountain of youth by allowing her to avoid children and enjoy married life" (412). Bill Hill has been performing man-made miracles, rather than those authored by the divine, and thus their failure is inevitable.

Ruby has placed her faith, which in another instance might go to a religious belief or conviction, in this feat of science and the supposed self-sufficiency that goes along with it. Once

Ruby reaches the top of the stairwell and says "Good Fortune [...] Baby" aloud (CSS 107), much like one of the other tenants in the apartment building that refers to her child as "Little Mister

Good Fortune" (CSS 98), does she realize that the "stroke of good fortune" was in fact a child. As

Carolyn Kerr notes, "Ruby Hill's nausea” and the other physical maladies she experiences that are “also associated with pregnancy, is more significantly experienced as a revulsion for the new existence growing inside her" (83), her desire to maintain control over nature and her body preventing her from acknowledging what is happening. Ruby's pregnancy and the child "resting

and waiting, with plenty of time" (CSS 107) represents a push back against the sterile and self- determined world lacking humanity and creation in which Ruby wants to live.

Ruby does not want to sacrifice her life, time, and energy to give birth and raise a child, having witnessed what the birth of her brother Rufus did to her mother, while embracing idea of being a "modern" woman living a "modern" life defined by self-gratification and convenience rather than sacrifice, a life somewhat similar to the Ashfields of "The River" who have a child but try to minimize the ways in which Harry influences and affects their life. O'Connor depicts

Ruby confronting her own humanity, manifested in the shocking form of the baby within her and the subsequent reconnection with humanity that she experiences because of this child. John

Sykes notes how "[t]he suffering human body itself becomes [O'Connor's] densest symbol [...] push[ing] a convention of literary modernism to its limit, making of it a sacramental analogue"

(Aesthetic of Revelation 5) and it is this that we see in "A Stroke of Good Fortune" with Ruby's pregnancy, which Ruby would conceive of as the greatest act of suffering one could endure.

While, as Thomas Haddox notes, "recent feminist readers who feel sympathy for Ruby's plight tend to read the story as confirmation of how thoroughly O'Connor had internalized a cruel patriarchal ideology that, unfortunately, also happened to be her Catholic faith" (5), the story functions more as a character turning towards modernity (in the form of birth control) and belief that the self can will and control the mysteries of the world and being changed as that character realizes the folly of such thinking. The story displays "the downward movement of grace" as

Ruby experiences "Physical ascent and spiritual descent" (Mystery of Love 59) through this revelation.

"The Artificial Nigger"

In "The Artificial Nigger," O'Connor uses the non-rural environment of the city, specifically Atlanta, to place characters within the modern world and to show their navigation of that world therein as Mr. Head is taking his grandson Nelson into the city. It is a story that "is a characteristic O'Connor work, everywhere informed by sharply dualistic extremes" (Asals 81), emphasizing the nature of the characters as ones who must make their way in between those extremes. However, this story stands about from O’Connor’s work, which depict settings and scenarios that appear to be removed from the modern world and contemporary (for O’Connor) issues, as it involves itself with issues of race like those that the country itself was addressing at that time. O’Connor, in this story, takes this conflict from the present in which she was living and uses it to illuminate and engage with theological and philosophical matters, thus taking these large and seemingly ahistorical notions and grounding them in the modern world.

Within the pairing of Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson, we see the two extreme views of the city and what it has to offer. While Mr. Head hopes that "the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was" (CSS 251), Nelson is clearly anticipating this trip as he is awake "at three-thirty [...] a corn pone on cooking and had friend the meat [...] sitting in the half-dark at the table, drinking cold coffee out of a can [...] [in] his new shirt and his new gray hat pulled low over his eyes" (CSS 251). Mr. Head endeavors to show Nelson that "he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city [...] to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life" (CSS 251). While

Nelson looks forward to being in the modern space on the city, Mr. Head does not see this space as being particularly good or admirable, rather "revel[ing] not in his identification with a

community," as Thomas Haddox notes, but “in the isolation of his family, which he wears as a badge of moral purity and social critique" (10).

Much of what Mr. Head uses to temper Nelson's expectations of the city comes through his noting of African Americans and Nelson's lack of experience with them. When the African

American porter on the train passes by Nelson and Mr. Head, Mr. Head asks if Nelson knows

"What kind of a man" passes by them to which Nelson replies "a man [...] a fat man [...] an old man," causing Mr. Head to reply "I thought you'd know a nigger since you seen so many when you was in the city on your first visit [when he was born]" (CSS 255). Whether because of

"children hav[ing] an instinctive discernment of the truth" (Christ-Haunted South 145) in

O'Connor's fiction or Nelson possesses "that instinctive goodness associated with 'wise blood'" that later "leads him to those black who turn out not to be obstructive elements in a wasteland city but rather a saving principle that reunites him with his grandfather on a human level"

(Woman, Thinker, Visionary 127), it is clear that Nelson does not possess the same conception of

African Africans as Mr. Head, for whom they have become a kind of symbol for modernity, which Ted Spivey notes when he writes "For Mr. Head, blacks are the contaminating element that makes a city a place of no value for any right-thinking person" (Woman, Thinker, Visionary

127).

Ultimately, the story pivots because of Mr. Head's ignoring Nelson to make a point about his lack of knowledge regarding the world and what to expect from it. When Nelson accidentally trips a woman, causing her to fall and hurt her ankle, she cries out "your daddy'll pay for it!

Every nickel!" (CSS 264), though Mr. Head naturally assumes that will be him. As "[t]he women all turned on" him and demand that he "pay every penny of [her] doctor's bill that [his] boy caused," Mr. Head replies "[t]his is not my boy [...] I never seen him before" (CSS 265). This

denial by Mr. Head alienates and distances Nelson from his grandfather. "Mr. Head had never disgraced himself before," but because of his actions Nelson "turned and stood with his back to his grandfather" as "Mr. Head began to feel the depth of his denial" (CSS 266). "With his denial of Nelson, the old man is stripped of all his pretensions," Asals notes, and "he can no longer evade recognition of himself as a bare forked animal whose agonized sense of damnation is entirely justified" (90) and not even saying "in a high desperately gay voice" that they should get

Cokes (CSS 266) can repair what this betrayal has wrought and leaves him "feel[ing] the boy's steady hate [...] and what man would be like without salvation" (CSS 267-268). Mr. Head has finally transgressed in his effort to show Nelson that he is not as smart and modern as he thought he was and thus feels "[e]stranged from the community of his kinsman Nelson because of his denial of his bond with the child" as "Mr. Head feels his sin against love" ("Stalking Joy" 108).

However, there is a moment of reconciliation between the two, one that provides the story with its title. While trying to find their way back to the train station and ultimately back to their home, they encounter "the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over on a low yellow brick fence that curved around a wide lawn [...] about Nelson's size and he was pitched forward at an unsteady angle [...] One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon"

(CSS 268). "In the statue of the artificial nigger," John Desmond writes, "O'Connor had discovered an image of sufficient power, depth, and mystery to incarnate fully her anagogic vision of reality and history" (Risen Sons 50) as "Mr. Head and Nelson suddenly see a history of

Negro suffering at the hands of white men" (Lake 106). "[T]he whole history of the sin of racial prejudice adumbrated in the attitudes of Nelson and Mr. Head" (Risen Sons 50), particularly in

Mr. Head as he used African-Americans as a symbol of the city and modernity and thus something to be discounted and reviled. Though a distance or detachment emerged between the

two based upon Mr. Head's denials, they both "stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets" (CSS 268). While they had been metaphorically separated and distanced from one another, the statue brings them together as it focuses their gaze, as O'Connor describes as the two "stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat.

They could feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy" (CSS 269).

The statue serves as a Christ figure in the way in which its obscenity or shocking nature is a kind of suffering and how that shock in turn takes away the betrayal and deceit that existed between them as "The crimes they have committed against each other being to melt away in the presence of this inhabited Cross" (Christ-Haunted South 149). After this experience, Nelson says to his grandfather "Let's go home before we get ourselves lost again" (CSS 269) and then begin their return trip home, "hav[ing] both been permanently altered by their encounter with the bent and harrowed emblem of the Suffering Servant" (Christ-Haunted South 149) with Mr. Head seeing "that his true depravity had been hidden from him" while Nelson tells his grandfather "I'm glad I've went [to the city] one, but I'll never go back again!" (CSS 270). By the end of the narrative we witness "Mr. Head's epiphanic insight [that] comes at the expense of his traditional convictions, through an experience in a contemporary landscape" (O'Gorman 186) while

Nelson's exuberance and interest in the city has been quelled.

In keeping with O'Connor's other stories, the narrative crux is a revelatory act or moment in which the hubris of man is corrected and thus can be saved. In the terms of the midcentury

American moment and the condition of pilgrimage that man would find himself in during that time, "The Artificial Nigger" is another consideration of a foolish and prideful clinging to past

ways that Mr. Head exhibits and an almost excessive embrace of modernity that Nelson possesses at the story's outset. Both are too extreme and what O'Connor portrays in her story is that corrective act, prompted by their witnessing of this plaster statue that calls to mind and represents a Christ-like sacrifice, that affects them and allows them to exist in the modern world.

Davis Leigh observes how "Mr. Head and his grandson have been partially transformed by sharing the suffering of each other and of the people embodied in the plaster Negro [...] Mr.

Head and his grandson reach a partial change of heart through an imaginative solidarity" (372), a moment of grace that is prompted by this symbol of the most unfortunate aspect of American history, a monument to the country's unfortunate racial heritage. But this encounter with that plaster statue is the corrective act the religious impulse provides and brings the two into the place they are supposed to be.

"Good Country People"

O'Connor's short story "Good Country People" differs as the notion of the pilgrimage and humankind's inherent condition as pilgrim is explored metaphorically. While the other stories that have been discussed explored this conception of man as the pilgrim making his way between the two poles of modernity and simple, pithy religious thought in narratives centered around literal depictions of travel and movement that make the pilgrim conception more apparent. In

“Good Country People,” O’Connor maps the pilgrimage in the interior lives of characters, particularly Hulga Hopewell, as a way of exploring the tensions that one, particularly an

American Catholic, would have to navigate in O’Connor’s time. In this story, Hulga is placed into the pilgrim's position as she comes to the realization that her overly modernized and rational worldview is not sustainable. However, illuminating the destructive implications of a simple and

unsubstantiated religious belief, O'Connor presents the character of Mrs. Hopewell to indicate this is not a journey that is limited to one who is placing the entirety of their faith in modernity but rather showing the dangers of oversimplification and reduction, in a moment when

O'Connor's own Catholic Church was aiming to find a balance between the traditional and the modern.

Hulga places belief in modernity and the technological, reflected in her education and expertise in the philosophical and the scientific. Earning a doctorate in philosophy, Hulga reads books that make observations such as "Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is [...] science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing" something to which Hulga responded as "these words had been underlined with a blue pencil" (CSS 277). Hulga has turned to a scientific knowing and placed her faith in a rational methodology rather than anything supernatural, mystical, and religious while her mother, with her embracing of religious beliefs, has turned away from reality.

"To her mother's forced cheerfulness, Joy responds with constant outrage" Christina Lake writes, and she "comes to believe that she has actually reduced everything to her mind" (126). In Hulga's eyes, her mother does not "ever look inside" to "see what you are not" (CSS 276) and it is that, her mother's "hopeless anti-intellectualism" (Lake 127) that dooms her in Hulga's eyes. Hulga has turned away from those things that would provide a sense of order, whether it be religion and belief or even beauty and aesthetics. "Her name was really Joy," O'Connor writes, "but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed [to] the ugliest name in any language [...] Her legal name was Hulga" (CSS 274). "Hulga Hopewell's renunciation of her given name Joy signifies her alienation from the true country on aesthetic, moral, and

theological levels" ("Stalking Joy" 107) as she stripped herself of the "beautiful name" her mother had given her in exchange for something that brought forth connotations of "the broad blank hull of a battleship" (CSS 274). It is a dehumanizing move, transforming Hulga into something that is not human but scientific and machine-like, also seen in the way she

"responding but in a purely mechanical way" (CSS 274) when her mother would call her Joy.

Hulga has removed something that carries beauty, just as she stripped herself of any illusions regarding her perception of herself and what she is. Hulga has rejected, in O'Connor's view, those things that make someone a human and turned herself into something inhuman, machine- like, freed from the flaws and imperfections that befall humans.

Because she "has achieved this salvation," specifically this freedom from the constraints of the flawed human life, "by accepting the nothingness of existence is what, in her eyes, sets her apart from everyone else" (Art and Vision 145). Hulga has improved herself, become better than all other people, having "decided that her mind is the only possible dwelling place for her"

(Hermit Novelist 79) and "Armed with what she sees as her penetrating vision and thoroughly rational mind, Hulga receives herself as the potential savior of those about her" (Art and Vision

146) Hulga's disabilities also play a role in defining her, but her "artificial leg" that she acquired because of "the hunting accident" when "the leg had been literally blasted off" (CSS 275) is of the greatest importance. In Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity,

Timothy Basselin notes how "the outer grotesqueries other characters parallel, and stand as metaphor for, the inner grotesqueries of her characters and her readers" and how in this instance the artificial leg she possesses stands as a outward representation of "a moral lack, as is the case with Joy/Hulga in 'Good Country People'" as "Original sin is the indictment [...] the wooden part of Joy/Hulga's soul" (41-43) manifested in the form of the artificial leg.

However, a mere turn toward the simple country life is not what O'Connor prescribes in this story. Hulga's mother, Mrs. Hopewell, represents a kind of religious simplicity and piety reminiscent of the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Mrs. Hopewell believes that

"good country people are the salt of the earth" and that "there aren't enough good country people in the world" (CSS 279), echoing the grandmother from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and her belief that "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust" while she "discussed better times" (CSS 122) with Red Sam. Mrs. Hopewell believes there is some kind of simple good or quality that certain people innately possess and carry with them. Just as Hulga believes things can be reduced to the scientific and rational, Mrs. Hopewell believes that things can be reduced to this "good country" sensibility and there being some people who are just innately the

"salt of the Earth," as Sarah Gordon notes how "Ironically, the daughter accuses the mother of the very fault of perception or of seeing that she herself exhibits, and certainly, to follow through on O'Connor's irony, neither woman is God" (178). Both Hulga and her mother strongly believe in the veracity of their most extreme and simple worldview, which can be seen in how they view

Manley Pointer. Mrs. Hopewell views him as a paragon of virtue, particularly those simple virtues she greatly values displayed with him saying "I know I'm real simple [...] I'm just a country boy" and talking about how "for a Chrustian, the word of God ought to be in every room in the house besides in his heart. I know you're a Chrustian because I can see it in every line of your face" (CSS 278). Manley Pointer emphasizes simplicity and innate goodness, which

O'Connor encodes into the language by having the text of Pointer's dialogue misspelling

Christian as "Chrustian."

Hulga also believes this about Manley Pointer but subsequently sees him as someone who she could seduce and corrupt. For Hulga, the notion of "good country people" is something

to be avoided. "Had it not been for this condition" that left her with a weakened heart and short life span, Hulga "would be far from these red hills and good country people [...] lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about" (CSS 276). It is not by choice that Hulga remains amongst these people and she would make that act of rejection by moving away. But, in the guise of Manley Pointer, Hulga has found the arena in which she can depict that rejection and destabilization as she "imagined that she seduced him [...] then, of course, she had to reckon with his remorse. True genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind [...] She took all his shame away and turned it into something useful" (CSS 284). For Hulga, the seduction of Manley

Pointer would be a victory for her beliefs as well as an affront to those things that her mother and the other simple good country people believe. In particular, John Desmond writes, it would expose "man's feeble inability to truly know, value or love anything at all. To [Hulga], nihilism is a 'saving' vision of mutual damnation, in fact a parody of the redeemed community" ("Stalking

Joy" 107), thus making her corruption of this man representative of the community's values all the more damning. But what is revealed is that "Joy/Hulga is guilty of jumping to conclusions about the Bible salesman on the basis of his appearance and the way he uses language. Like her mother, she will attempt to impose her will on another" (Gordon 178), that Hulga's thinking and approach are just as simple and flawed as her mother's valorization of Manley's seeming simplicity.

Though initially occupying their assumed roles, with Manley saying that Hulga "ain't saved" because she is an atheist while she says "In my economy [...] I'm saved and you are damned," once they are both in the second story of the barn where Hulga hoped to enact her seduction the dynamics change. While in the barn, Hulga takes off her wooden leg at Pointer's insisting and leaves is off because, as he states, "You got me instead" (CSS 289). "Pointer

discerns what Hulga loves most: it is not her maidenhead but the emblem of her crippled condition, her wooden leg" Ralph Wood describes and "that to steal Hulga's wooden leg is to inflict the utmost devastation: it is to destroy the very icon of her faith" (Christ-Haunted South

207), but because she believes in her superiority Hulga is willing to give it to him though not without reservations and apprehensions, which turn out to be well founded. As Manley Pointer

"took one of [the two bibles] out and opened the cover of it" to pull out "a pocket flask of whiskey," Hulga wonders aloud in "an almost pleading" tone "aren't you just good country people" (CSS 289-290). Hulga has believed that Manley Pointer was nothing like her but in reality she "ain't so smart" and he's "been believing in nothing ever since [he] was born," which he says to her as he leaves the barn with her wooden leg in tow. Richard Giannone notes how

Pointer's "artfully slow dismantling reduces Hulga's entire person to a mere gadget, and we feel

[...] that he who was so alluring turns out to be injurious" (Mystery of Love 65).

This moment forces Hulga to confront that her faith in modernity and science does not give her all the answers and superiority. Rather than being the religious pilgrim who must find their way in the modern world, Hulga is the modern pilgrim who must find their way in the religious world and is given the change of grace through this encounter. Pointer functions as

"Hopewell's unintentional savior, having stolen not so much her wooden leg as her false faith"

(Christ-Haunted South 208-209). Christina Lake describes the character as "Strangled [...] by this kind of pride" and that "Only a displacing encounter could break down the separations she has made rigid, an encounter that rejoins body and mind and resuscitates her soul as a soul"

(129), something that occurs with Manley Pointer's seizure of her wooden leg and abandonment of her in the barn, actions that echo " the language of the Christian's surrender to Christ—Jesus taught that one must lose one's life to find it" (Lake 131).

However, O'Connor does not present the mother's point of view as valid and superior.

Seeing Manley Pointer leave the barn after his encounter with Hulga, she remarks that "that looks like that nice dull young man that tried to sell me a bible yesterday [...] He must have been selling them to the Negroes back in there. He was so simple" (CSS 291). Mrs. Hopewell cannot see through to the truth any more than Hulga can, allowing her conception of "good country people" to persist and shape how she sees Manley Pointer. Mrs. Hopewell remarks that "the world would be better off if we were all that simple" to which Mrs. Freeman replies "Some can't be that simple [...] I know I never could" (CSS 291). Mrs. Freeman, who begins and ends the story, has moved past the simplicity and reductive thinking of Mrs. Hopewell as well as her daughter and thus can see things as they are. Simplicity, whether of Mrs. Hopewell's variety or that which Hulga displays, is "roundly dismissed that worldview as hopelessly naïve" and "Mrs.

Hopewell's dire categorization of everything [...] led Joy/Hulga to her predicament in the first place" (Lake 132). By pointing out the link between these two, Lake hints at how O'Connor is addressing the issue of these two polarities and how the answer, and all of man's existence, must be somewhere in the middle of the two navigating in the pilgrim's place and condition.

For O’Connor, a central concern of hers is man’s condition as that of the pilgrim navigating the world while trying to reconcile the tradition of a religious past and the modern present in which the given human lives. As O’Connor’s engagement with these ideas takes place in her fiction composed during a period when the institutional Catholic Church was navigating similar issues and redefining itself as a pilgrim church, largely prompted by the expansion of the

Catholic Church’s stature in the United States, her fascination with this pilgrim condition is indicative of not just Catholic literary aesthetics, but specifically of an American Catholic one.

These ideas also appear in the other stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

along with those collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge and in her second novel, The

Violent Bear It Away. But in these stories, the author most strongly represents these ideas regarding the pilgrim and the pilgrim condition that were being examined in the culture and discourse surrounding Catholicism at that time.

CHAPTER 2

WALKER PERCY

"Once I spent my time playing tough guy scenes but I was living in a world of childish dreams. Someday these childish dreams must end to become a man and grow up to dream again.” Bruce Springsteen, “Two Hearts”

Walker Percy stands alongside Flannery O'Connor as the other major voice amongst

American Catholic writers. Percy's writing depicts, in narrative form as well as in his essays that further explored these ideas, a yoking of existential thought with Catholic theology and bringing that into the twentieth century American context. In particular, Percy endorsed a construction of existentialist philosophy that brought together the writing of Soren Kierkegaard with that of the

Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel to present a philosophy of man that placed him at the center of things, moving away from abstraction and idealism toward a belief in the uniqueness of man and his experience of the world as one that cannot be reduced or essentialized. Percy's existentialism stressed the pilgrim nature of man, moving toward something greater but still existing in and engaging with the modern world. Percy's conception of man as a wayfarer or pilgrim, one seen in his portrayal of Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer, reflects the winds of change moving through the Catholic Church in the 1950s and 1960s that had a great effect on American Catholics through the discussions and debates leading up to and throughout the Second Vatican Council.

References to the Second Vatican Council in Percy scholarship are, by and large, in line with Kieran Quinlan who writes of "[i]n the late 1950s when The Moviegoer was being written, the Catholic church was not yet undergoing the aggiornamento, much less the turmoil, that would being with the Second Vatican Council in the next decade" (100-101) and John Sykes' noting of Percy's "reluctance to portray the inside of church life grew as post-Vatican II

Catholicism began to spin off in experimental directions he found to be misguided" (Aesthetic of

Revelation 163). Percy is usually situated, relative to Vatican II, in opposition or bristling against it in some way. But understanding Percy in this way, as a strictly preconciliar Catholic writer ignores the emphasis placeed on the wayfarer or pilgrim condition throughout his writing.

Rather than standing in opposition, Percy's engagement with this philosophy would connect with, to borrow an oft-used phrase, The Spirit of Vatican II. The animus of that Council and the changes it precipitated for the Church itself, situating the Church as connected to the past but present as a pilgrim body, mirrored the existential Catholicism to which Percy subscribed.

Patricia Poteat notes how Percy's belief was in "that of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which man is neither angel nor beast but sovereign wayfarer; in which the world is consecrated as the locus of faith and of each man's responsibility to God and to other men" (83), not leaning too greatly to one side or another. The Second Vatican Council aimed to make the Church's pilgrim nature more apparent and that era of the Council (the years leading up to it and including it) can be thus understood, to use the terminology of Gabriel Marcel and Walker Percy, as that of ecclesia viator (or church as pilgrim). Thus Percy's consideration of homo viator at that same moment is in line with the spirit of that age.

Much like with Flannery O'Connor, this more nuanced quality of Percy's fiction

(particularly the fiction he produced in the mid-twentieth century) is under considered. By overlooking this, we fail to understand the way in which Percy connects to the specific moment he was living in as an American Catholic of that time. Rather than being one who retreated and disconnected himself from the present, whose "critique" focusing on how "mass culture has so completely engulfed society" is understood as the "conservative one" (Simmons 605), Percy sought to navigate the modern world. The centrality Percy places on the pilgrim condition of

man and that experience of the world complicates those readings of the author that would cast him as a reactionary or traditional author and reflects the ways in which he connected to the

Catholic Church's moves to modernize that would be of particular concern to Catholics in

America.

To explore these ideas, Percy draws upon existentialist philosophy to orient his depiction of the modern world. Frequently regarded as "one of the first American novelists to write deliberately in the existentialist mode" (Conversations 12), Percy followed in the tradition of authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as he "use[d] the fiction form as a vehicle for incarnating ideas, as did Jean Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel [...] decid[ing] that [his] philosophy is in the vein of the existentialist, as theirs were" (Conversations

9). Percy’s understanding of existentialism came in large part from an engagement with the work of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard shadows Percy's work, even providing the epigraph for his novel The Moviegoer while also being alluded to by that novel's protagonist at its end (TM 237). Percy augmented the influence of Kierkegaard's philosophy by drawing on Catholic theologians and thinkers, whether through an "embrace of Augustianian anthropology and phenomenology [...] offer[ing] a robust foundation for his Christian existentialism" (Messer 13-14) or by possessing what Paul Giles refers to as "a crossed heritage" of "Kierkegaard confronting Aquinas" (375). Each scholar identifies a way in which Percy augmented his engagement with the Danish philosopher through the most orthodox Catholic theology of Augustine and Aquinas.

In addition to these acts of bringing together Catholicism and existential philosophy,

Percy drew upon the work of a philosopher who shared both his existential outlook as well as

Catholic belief. Though "[t]he growing body of criticism on Percy's novels has confirmed this

special indebtedness to Kierkegaard,"9 Mary Deems Howland writes, "there has been little exploration of the equally important debt to [Gabriel] Marcel" (2). Marcel, a contemporary and debating partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, converted to Catholicism in 1929 and it was based on

Sartre's views of God and religion that the two most frequently (and powerfully) clashed. Marcel articulated an existentialism that allowed for the presence of a religious dimension and, most importantly, that was consistent with the Catholic belief. One aspect of Marcel's philosophy that was of greatest interest to Percy was the idea of homo viator, defining man's nature as being that of the pilgrim, wayfarer or itinerant.

In the lectures collected in The Mystery of Being, Marcel describes "taking one's stand against that mirage of abstract, absolute truth that has been thrown up by a certain type of intellectualism" as "[t]here is not, and there cannot be, any global abstraction, any final high terrace to which we can climb by means of abstract thought, there to rest for ever; for our condition in this world does remain [...] that of a wanderer, an itinerant being, who cannot come to absolute rest except by a fiction, a fiction which it is the duty of philosophic reflection to oppose with all its strength" (133). “Marcel argues that one’s incarnation in a body is an absolute requirement for being in the world” (Howland 7), thus one could not deny or abstract themselves from the physical world while also striving for an engagement with the divine. Elsewhere,

Marcel expanded upon this idea, saying "a stable order can only be established if man is acutely aware of his condition as a traveler [...] if he perpetually reminds himself that he is required to cut himself a dangerous path across the unsteady blocks of a universe which has collapsed and seems to be crumbling in every direction […] lead[ing] to a world more firmly established in

Being […] whose changing and uncertain gleams are all that we can discern here below" (Homo

Viator 146). That image of man, navigating a path while trying to maintain a precarious balance,

best conveys Marcel's conception of homo viator, and it is this quality of Marcel that Percy drew upon and used to develop the conception of man that would appear in his fiction.

Percy references Marcel in various interviews, describing how he "use[s] the fiction form as a vehicle for incarnating ideas, as did Jean Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel" (Conversations 9) and later saying he "always was closer to Frenchmen like Sartre or Camus or Marcel"

(Conversations 31). Percy's description of his own existential Catholic belief in The Paris

Review reflects Marcel's influence saying it had "been expressed better in an earlier, more traditional language—e.g., scriptural: man born to trouble as the sparks fly up; Gabriel Marcel's

Homo viator" and describing it as "a certain view of man, an anthropology, if you like; of man as wayfarer, in a rather conscious contrast to prevailing views of man as organism, as encultured creature, as consumer, Marxist, as subject to such and such a scientific or psychological understanding—all of which he is, but not entirely" (55-56). For Percy, man is inherently a pilgrim or wayfarer, making their way through the world and cannot be reduced to one simple or abstract quality, “tak[ing] Marcel’s phenomoenological study of the relationship between ‘I’ and

‘my body’ and us[ing] it in his novels as a constant reminder of the individual’s ontological status in the world” (Howland 8). In his speech upon winning the National Book Award for The

Moviegoer, Percy describes how the purview of his book takes "the posture of the pathologist with his suspicion that something is wrong. There is time for me to say only this: that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the 'dignity of the individual' and 'self-realization' are being heard more frequently than ever" (Signposts 246).

Ross Labrie describes how “Percy’s attraction to Christianity, and particularly to

Catholicism, rested upon his sense that Christ had brought news from without […] illuminat[ing]

the human predicament in a way that human beings had been unable to do” (149), acknowledging that need for something that exists outside of what man has created and determined. Percy's concern is with man's individuality and uniqueness, concerns heightened at the time when Percy was writing given the specter of instantaneous destruction through an atomic bomb as well as a rise in consumer culture and goods amidst American post-war prosperity. Percy saw man as a being that could not be reduced to one thing or category, and depicting this dilemma that emerges from the philosophy of Kierkegaard and Marcel is the issue with which most of Percy's fiction is concerned.

Given this outlook coupled with his devout religious belief, Percy is often cast as a reactionary or conservative figure. The American Conservative magazine has sponsored an annual Walker Percy Weekend in St. Francisville, Louisiana and been active in the promotion of

Percy's legacy. Percy, perhaps even more so than O'Connor, is cast as an author who is a

"conservative" and invoked in much of their discussion. George Cotkin writes that Percy's

"degenerates into a force of passivity and conservatism, as a courage to exist quietly, apart from the battles of society” over time and displaying “a philosophical retreat from politics into the larger, more enduring questions of existence and the nature of truth" (87). Percy is cast as an author retreating from the modern world because of the criticisms of it he articulates due to his philosophical outlook. Kieran Quinlan describes how Percy would "become quite conservative" because of his Catholicism "as the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s seemed [...] to be effectively excessive compromises with a secular world" (6). This image of Percy as one who "remained skeptical of the ideas not only of the new thinkers, but even more so of those Catholics involved in Liberation Theology and other attempts at bringing the Church into the twentieth century" and upholding "absolute dedication to the view of the

Church enunciated by Pope John Paul II" and advanced by other conservative Catholic commentators (Quinlan 7) has persisted. To this day, Percy is read as an orthodox conservative author who "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," using William F. Buckley definition of conservatism in the first issue of National Review. However, this consideration of the author is overly simplistic and overlooks Percy’s more liberal tendencies that had been present throughout his life as well as the ways in which his philosophical outlook would not be quite as consistent with these notions of conservatism and tradition as it is generally portrayed.

To begin, one must acknowledge that there is a kernel of truth to this, specifically owing to Percy's Catholic belief and the nature of that belief. T.S. Eliot writes in Christianity and

Culture of how "[t]he Liberal notion that religion was a matter of private belief and of conduct in private life, and that there is no reason why Christians should not be able to accommodate themselves to any world which treats them good-naturedly, is becoming less and less tenable"

(17), highlighting how religious belief is necessarily and inherently a traditional (or conservative) affair. For Eliot, who did much in terms of defining much of the discourse surrounding Christianity along with ideas of the traditional or conservative in the twentieth century, there is something inescapably conservative that goes along with religious belief, particularly Christianity as is the case in Eliot. Writing about Eliot, the famed conservative scholar Russel Kirk notes how "Eliot moved toward Christian faith because he had seen to what the modern world was descending in the decay of faith. If the land is an arid waste when the waters of faith have dried up, then those waters must have been the source of life in the person and in the commonwealth" (118), conceiving of Eliot's religious faith as a conservative move against detrimental progress, mirroring how Percy is regarded by readers in his context.

Famously writing on the concept of tradition in poetry in "Tradition and the Individual

Talent," Eliot defines the idea as:

It involves, in the first place, the historical sense [...] the historical sense involves a

perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense

compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a

feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of

the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a

simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the

temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer

traditional. (38)

While making it clear that "if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes

[then] 'tradition' should positively be discouraged" (4), Eliot links this connection to the past at the heart of the religious impulse. This conserving element that goes with religious belief was one that was not denied even by more liberal religious thinkers. As editor for the liberal lay

Catholic journal Commonweal William Clancy describes, "the question here of the liberal and conservative Catholic is not a doctrinal question. Doctrinally, every Catholic is a conservative, and is proud to be a conservative" (42). In Catholicism, doctrine aims to conserve the tradition of the past and keep those things in place, thus there is always something somewhat conservative in religious (specifically Catholic) belief. This linking of traditional or conservative ideas and religious belief can be seen, to some degree, in Percy's writing. However, this overstates and oversimplifies Percy's critique of modernity and does not reflect the complexity and nuance of

the author, a complexity that is in keeping with the Catholic sensibility of that time that contained both “liberal” and “conservative” elements.

By holding onto more traditional or eternal truths central and yet still engaging with

(rather than dismissing) any kind of progress or change, Percy mirrored the sensibility that persisted throughout much of the Church itself at that time, namely that of the Second Vatican

Council. As opposed to other writers and thinkers of roughly the same time that resisted the opening up of the practice of the Catholic faith, with authors such as Evelyn Waugh lamenting the adoption of the vernacular into the mass, Percy's opinion of Vatican II was much more tempered as he did not dismiss the changes to the practice of Catholicism. Though acknowledging that he is "not a student of Vatican II," Percy "remember[ed] the openness of

John XXIII, his ideas, what he wanted to achieve for the Church, what he did achieve [...] emphasiz[ing] all through the council that these things are necessary for the life and health of the

Church" while "he insisted on preserving 'the sacred deposit of faith,' as he called it" (More

Conversations 116). For Percy, changes to the liturgy and clarification regarding certain teachings did not take away from what is at the heart of Catholic belief and the faith. Percy describes "know[ing] many old-style Catholics who were scandalized by the Church's giving up

Latin [...] who think that all the trouble started when Latin was dropped" but notes that

"Beautiful liturgy is all very well [...] But that's not integral to the unity and integrity of the faith"

(More Conversations 116-117).

Percy's attitude towards the changes in Catholic liturgy are more nuanced, taking a stance toward religious belief and practice that allows for modernization and change while upholding the foundational traditions. These statements by Percy, made later in his life, conflict with those readings that make the Second Vatican Council and the reforms that went along with it as a point

of contention for the author, with "[t]he disunity in the post-Vatican II church in Percy's novels

[being] all too apparent" (Labrie 150) and casting him as "the 'last' Catholic novelist [...] in the sense that his vision of the world has been profoundly shaped by a particular period in recent

Catholic history [the era preceding the Second Vatican Council], and such a vision [...] is no longer viable" (Quinlan 9). Rather than being one who chafed at the changes and refinements brought about by the Second Vatican Council, Percy's outlook is one that, much like the pilgrim in Marcel's philosophy, moves between two sides but never descending into a wholly and abstract endorsement of one or the other. Claiming that Percy was somehow out of step with the general movement of Vatican II denies much of what characterizes Percy and the philosophy to which he subscribed.

Percy's political stances mirror this religious engagement with the traditional and the progressive. Percy's attitude toward matters of race and segregation were much more liberal than his fellow Southerners at that time, being “unapologetic in his support for the desegregation of local schools” (“Brief Biography” 23) and other related issues. But even as time moved forward and his views did become more conservative, it was only in a relative sense as Percy exhibited balance and lack of absolutism. In interviews given later in life, Percy articulates a politics that, while not as liberal and progressive, was still not one that could be classified as predominantly conservative. In one interview, Percy says "I don't think liberal Democrats have had a new idea since Roosevelt. The Democrats, and I'm one of them, seem to have become a mish-mash of minorities and pressure groups without any overriding political faith. But I have not become more conservative about race, or the treatment of the disadvantaged, minorities, or the Third

World. So I don't find myself at home with the New Right" (More Conversations 120). While

Percy does articulate disagreements with what the Democratic Party had become (and, by and

large, what it largely remains), he makes it clear that a conservative approach (particularly the

American brand of conservatism) was not to his liking either. As Ted Spivey notes in The Writer as Shaman: The Pilgrimages of Walker Percy and Conrad Aiken, despite "his Catholicism and his attacks on various aspects of modern life dear to some liberals, [Percy] is sometimes thought to be a conservative. But Marcel's strong influence on Percy and Percy's own continuing involvement with science, contemporary philosophy, and the everyday life of ordinary people place him in one contemporary branch of the liberal tradition" (95-96). By realizing these reductive ways in which Percy is read along this liberal and conservative axis, we begin to grasp that Percy is not a wholly conservative literary figure.

Percy's comments that pertain to science and technology convey a similar mindset.

Throughout his essays and fiction, Percy displays a hearty skepticism towards the ascendant scientism and hyper-rationality of the mid-twentieth century. In "The Loss of the Creature,"

Percy writes of what is lost to the modern man, describing how "[f]irst, sovereignty is lost" and then "it is radically devalued by theory [...] a loss which has been brought about by science but through no fault of the scientist and through no fault of scientific theory. The loss has come about as a consequence of the seduction of the layman by science" (Bottle 63). Percy's qualms are not with science and progress on their own, as the author "never repudiated the scientific method [...] maintain[ing] an appreciation for its beauty and clarity" but rather "argued that questions about values in human life, or those involved with how to live in a century 'where science is triumphant' are beyond the reach of the scientific method" (Howland 2). Rather, Percy’s issue was not so much with science and the progress that discoveries through that realm could unlock but that many would suppose that science could answer all questions, including those that transcended the scientific realm, that there existed an “exaltation of science” and a

“misapprehension of the scientific method” (Dupuy 91) that led many astray. Though because of scientific progress and discovery “man […] will have met every ‘need’ which can be abstracted by the objective-empirical method” Percy writes in “The Man on the Train, he “may nevertheless be alienated [...] apt to be alienated in proportion to his staking everything on the objective- empirical” (Bottle 84) because not all problems can be addressed through the scientific. The pilgrim condition to which Percy subscribes, the one most clearly articulated by Gabriel Marcel, is when one moves through the world in a way that does not tilt too far one way or another. For

Percy, the more pressing issue is not the conflict between progress and tradition but rather when one goes too far into one of those things.

While making definitive statements as to whether Percy should be categorized as a

"conservative" is not a worthwhile endeavor, noting how he considers these issues provides a window into Percy's worldview, helping us to realize that Percy's attitude and point of view cannot be reduced and simplified when it comes to the "modern" and the "traditional." In many ways, Percy can be understood best in terms of one of the major and most influential Catholic publications in America at that time—Commonweal. As former editor Peter Steinfels describes in his reflection upon the magazine's seventy-fifth anniversary, "Commonweal strove to bring

Catholic faith and modern life, especially the experience of American freedom and diversity, into fruitful contact [...] offer[ing] a unique perspective on its nation, its church, its century" (17).

After noting the magazine's editorial positions that conflicted with readers of conservative and liberal persuasions, Steinfels writes of how "[i]n many ways, the Second Vatican Council was the fulfillment of the magazine's hopes" as it "dismantled the barricades Catholicism had thrown up against the modern world" (18-20). Percy, who wrote essays for the magazine including his notable "Stoicism in the South," is very much in line with the sensibility and worldview of

Commonweal at that time and can be understood less as a “liberal” or “conservative” but rather as a Commonweal Catholic, balancing the valuing of tradition with a willingness to confront and engage with the modern world. William Clancy, writing for Commonweal, describes how for

"[t]he Catholic liberal [...] God's providence did not stop at some point in history" (47) as

"[t]hose Catholics who are described as 'liberal' [...] 'open' toward modern civilization [...] search for the evidences of God's providence in history, even in movements where they may least expect to find God's hand" (48).

In many ways, these ideas that Clancy articulated in his 1960 piece provides us with a road map as to how Percy should be understood. Rather than mirroring "those Catholics who call themselves conservatives" whose "attitudes toward modern civilization [...] have been vehemently negative," Percy is closer to the “Catholic liberal” Clancy describes who

"distinguishes [...] conserv[ing] and adapt[ing]" since "the tragedy of conservative Catholicism" is "that is has so completely polarized itself, and built such thick walls around itself, that it has forsaken the Christian's second vocation, which is to adapt the truths he has conserved to the unique needs of the present" (47). What Clancy describes as the "Catholic liberal" is one who is not to one side or the other but rather balances the conservation of the past with an engagement with the present, a stance very much in line with the desire to refresh and adapt that would culminate in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council as well as with what Percy depicted of the human condition through his fiction, particularly through his protagonists.

Much like his fellow American Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy is often read as an author retreating from the modern world, denying the present by turning back to a lost and idealized past through the theology and philosophy of the Catholic Church. However, this reading of Percy dramatically understates the author's engagement with his present moment

and obfuscates what Percy articulated through his fiction and its connections to the larger conversation within Catholicism during the mid-twentieth century. Rather than retreating from the present, Percy depicts the condition of man as one not of binaries and isolation but rather a navigation between the two. While scholars such as Kieran Quinlan, who describes how Percy would move to the side of those "clearly intent on halt the slide into relativism that, from some perspectives, had plagued the Catholic church since the end of the Second Vatican Council"

(162), argue that Percy's writing was incompatible with the shifts that occurred within the

Church in that time, the author was much more in tune with Catholicism in mid-twentieth century America and, more importantly, the impulse that manifested itself in the Second Vatican

Council and the changes that came out of it. Appropriately enough for an author concerned with the individual and the individual's experience in the world, the space where this is best displayed is in his novels' protagonists.

The Moviegoer, Percy's first published novel, is also his best known and most widely honored; it won the National Book Award and introduced the author into the American literary and intellectual discourse. But beyond its importance as Percy's initial foray into American letters, The Moviegoer also most precisely distills Percy's philosophical outlook and the concerns that would dominate his writing career. Written in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen- sixties before being published in 1962, Percy's novel connects to the concerns that would be most pressing to a Catholic, particularly an American Catholic like Percy, at that time. The novel's protagonist, Jack "Binx" Bolling, is one who exhibits the characteristics associated with a conception of humanity that emphasizes its pilgrim nature. Throughout Binx's development and his progression as homo viator, one that tracks along with the stages of a man's life as depicted by Kierkegaard, Percy returns to the idea that he is someone that is "in between" or attempting to

navigate the world while not falling too far to one side or another. It is through this quality that

Percy's novel and the story of its main character reflects the Catholic thinking of the time, not strictly or solely "liberal" but also not the orthodox traditionalist thinking with which Percy and his novel are most often associated. Binx's narrative connects to, through its depiction of man's condition as that of the pilgrim who exists in the world without falling into absolutes or abstraction, the shifts and movements occurring around the Catholic Church at that time that would lead to its emphasizing the church's pilgrim nature brought about by the aggiornamento

Pope John XXIII called for that would be performed by the Second Vatican Council. Thus "Binx

[…] not find[ing] a clear-cut solution to his anxiety or be able to effectively reconcile past and future with his present lifestyle" (Osborne 123) does not mean his narrative is a failure as the pilgrim, either the individual or a pilgrim church as the Catholic Church aspired to be, is never fully reconciled as that would entail coming to a stop rather than continuing to move forward. By understanding how Percy's depiction of Binx casts him as this pilgrim figure who lives in the modern world yet strives for a connection to a greater truth while remaining in that present,

Percy's novel can be read as being indicative of that moment of change for the Church and its followers, connecting Percy and his fiction to the spirit of the Second Vatican Council itself.

Though the figure of homo viator in The Moviegoer is Binx and it is his narrative that follows that of the wayfarer learning to navigate this world, at the novel's outset Binx rejects his wayfaring nature. John Desmond describes how "the highly self-conscious Binx suffers many of the afflictions of Cartesian dualism [...] prone to taking a detached observer's stance toward the world, to formulating experience reductively, and to abstracting and categorizing others" (Search for Community 42). It is in this abstraction and removal that Binx reduces himself to solely a consumer rather than embracing the entirety of his human existence. Binx is rooted in the

everyday, "living uneventfully in Gentilly, a middle class suburb of New Orleans" (TM 6), "a modern, pleasant, neutral zone" (Sweeny 13) where Binx can "stew in his own sense of alienation" (Kobre 23). The choices Binx makes in addition to where he lives also reflects this quality to his life at the novel's outset. Binx focuses on consumer goods, noting his

"subscrib[ing] to Consumer Reports" and "own[ing] a first class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant" (TM 7). "Binx associates the pursuit of happiness with 'everydayness,' which he characterizes as the immersion of the self into the role of a consumer of goods, services, hobbies, and expert advice," Elizabeth Amato notes, as "the liberal pursuit of happiness is the attempt to make the self happy by the possession of goods"

(49). These products are how Binx distinguishes himself, as one who uses the best consumer goods that make life much more pleasurable and endurable, reducing his experience of the world to these finite things.

Binx also describes how "it is a pleasure to carry out the duties of a citizen and to receive in return a receipt or a neat styrene card with one's name on it certifying, so to speak, one's right to exist" (TM 7) and that he "enjoys answering polls as much as anyone [...] tak[ing] pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all questions" (TM 14). Binx values being quantified and reduced, whether it be a statistic of by providing information and thus receiving something to "certify" his existence, operating under the belief that "a man's right to exist has to be certified institutionally, by identity cards or receipts for money spent" and thus "announces the theme of functionalism and dispossession in modern society that provides a surrounding medium for the novel" (Luschei

75). Binx's "wallet is full of identity cards, library cards, credit cards" and he speaks reverentially of the "flat olive-drab strongbox [...] heavily built with double walls for fire protection" where he keeps his "birth certificate, college diploma, honorable discharge, G.I. insurance, a few stock

certificates and [his] inheritance" (TM 6). Binx "surrendered his identity to his diploma, GI discharge, and stock certificates" (Ciuba 58), allowing his existence to be determined by these things that reduce him and quantify his life in simple and abstract terms.

Binx’s life in Gentilly "provides a sense of control" as he "interacts with a limited number of people and carefully avoids issues that provoke anxiety" (Osborne 114), one that is reduced and small enough as to prevent the intrusion of any mystery or complexity. Binx speaks of "[b]eing a creature of habit, as regular as a monk" particularly regarding "listen[ing] at ten to a program called This I Believe" that features "hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, stat[ing] their personal credos" and emphasizing "the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual" (TM 108-

109). Percy "parodies the creeds of niceness espouses on radio's 'This I Believe'" (Ciuba 67), as

Percy uses Binx's devotion to this program to show how far away he initially is from any kind of authentically-held religious belief, the likes of which Binx possesses at the end of the novel.

Those ideas discussed on This I Believe are, as Percy portrays them, abstractions that, when brought into the world, are not sustainable. Binx notes this himself as he describes "hav[ing] known a couple of these believers, humanists and lady psychologists [...] when it comes down to this or that particular person [...] they usually hate his guts" (TM 109). While those who put their faith in things like This I Believe, notions that sound and look good but do not offer any kind of stability or true foundation, appear to have something to believe in they do not offer anything lasting or real.

Moviegoing, the act most associated with Binx and what gives this novel its title, ties into this quality of his life as well. Binx's moviegoing and his fluency in the jargon of movie culture also reflects the ways in which his initial state is one that does not acknowledge his pilgrim

condition by keeping him close to fleeting and unsatisfying pleasures. Mary Deems Howland describes how "[m]oviegoing is one stratagem that Binx uses to orient himself: while he is in the theater, all life is reduced to the image on the screen, his own eyes are interchangeable with the camera, and 'real' life is temporarily suspended" (28). Binx’s moviegoing is endemic of his existence in what Kierkegaard defined as the aesthetic stage of one’s life. Kierkegaard describes this notion in Either/Or as when one "love[s] the accidental. A smile from a pretty girl in an interesting situation, a stolen glance, that is what you are hunting for, that is a motif for your aimless fantasy" as one "fanc[ies] that every girl would count herself lucky to be [his] sweetheart for one week (7-8). This period is one that Percy scholar John Sykes refers to as a time of

"considered unseriousness" (Aesthetic of Revelation 129) when one desires those things that are not substantial and fleeting. Because it is the stage most associated with one's youth and thus not having a sense of time, the aesthetic feels as though they "are the epitome of any and every possibility [...] pursu[ing] every mood, every idea, good or bad, happy or sad, to its outermost limit" (16-17) and focuses their life on continuing to pursue those possibilities and experiences for as long as they can.

As he is trapped in this stage in which these fleeting aesthetic pleasures matter primarily, the act of moviegoing and the movies themselves become the most important thing in Binx’s life.

The important moments in Binx's life are his moments of moviegoing as he "remember[s] [...] is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in

Stagecoach, and the tie the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man" (TM 7).

The moments that stand out in Binx's life are not the things that happen to him or the people he has known but rather the films he has watched and what transpired on the screen with this

"moviegoer find[ing] the projected world of films to be more substantial than his own" (Aesthetic

of Revelation 124). Woods Nash describes “Binx [as] a moviegoer in a metaphorical sense— that is, his literal moviegoing is a metaphor for his having a Cartesian mind” (31), his obsession with watching movies reflecting the disconnection he experiences from real life. The films Binx recalls watching all share certain qualities. Whether seeing The Ox-Bow Incident with Kate and

Fort Hobbs with Lonnie or the allusions to popular movie stars such as Gregory Peck, Ava

Gardner, and Rory Calhoun, Binx's moviegoing and the frame of reference it provides him leans towards the popular and broadly appealing with the actors referenced amongst the most popular and many of the films as "genre" films, such as westerns and noir-detective films. John Edward

Hardy describes how Binx "has no highbrow enthusiasm for arty foreign films, no purists preferences for classics of the silent era. The films and actors he talks about are standard popular favorites of his time" (32). Binx's moviegoing should be understood as reflecting a desire for greater knowledge and understanding, but rather as a diversion or superfluous and fleeting entertainment. While at the (roughly) same time there was an emergent French New Wave of cinema and directors like Elia Kazan and Alfred Hitchcock were advancing film in America,

Binx instead seeks out the films that are closer to the older conceptions of film that saw the medium as a distraction rather than any kind of art.

Binx's moviegoing and the role it plays in his life echo most of his interpersonal relationships. Binx states how his "companion on these evening outings and weekend trips is usually [his] secretary" (TM 7), linking the two together. Binx's relationships with women are limited to his secretaries, changing with great regularity and rooted in a combination of physical attraction and the performative act of trying to seem like the characters from the movies he has so readily consumed. Binx describes how "[t]hey could be called love affairs [...] They started off as love affairs anyways, fine careless raptures in which Marcia or Linda (but not yet Sharon)"

(TM 8), referring to the names of his two previous secretaries as well as his current one that he tries to seduce later in the novel. Whether referring to them as "fine careless raptures" or not distinguishing between the names of two of the women, there is not much substance to the relationships between the women and Binx. The nature of these relationships is fleeting and transitory, which John Sykes identifies when he writes of how Binx "has a series of secretaries whom he purses romantically [...] his affairs with them run their course and end. It seems that once the excitement of the chase wanes, so does Binx's interest—as indeed does the interest of the woman" (Aesthetic of Revelation 124). The way Binx discusses his current secretary, and thus current romantic interest, Sharon reflects this.

Binx's romancing of Sharon is one largely predicated on postures and schemes, acting as though there are feelings of love there when there are not. Binx says that "for two weeks" he has

"thought of little else" besides Sharon Binx has "not asked her for a date or spoken of anything other than business [...] seem[ing] quite indifferent" (TM 65). Though he professes to be "in love with Sharon Kincaid," Binx has "not asked her for a date nor even been specially friendly" and speaks of how "[h]er person has acquired a priceless value to [him]" (TM 67). Binx is trying to act like one who is in love with someone with Sharon becoming the object Binx can use to define himself, keeping a "Gregory Peckish sort of distance" (TM 68) before creating the circumstances for their relationship to begin, taking Sharon with her as he sells a piece of property owned by his family and says "[i]t is a great joy to be with Sharon and to make money at it and to seem to pay no attention to her" (TM 95). "Concealed behind his observatorial distance and his impersonations, and caught up in his repetitions and rotations," Mary Deems Howland identifies,

"Binx does not genuinely encounter his secretaries but rather meets them as a young well-to-do man on the make, imitating the gestures of movie stars" (31). These dalliances are treated as a

kind of curiosity or kind of exercise, built more on performance and the external performance rather than any kind of actual feeling.

What runs throughout Binx's life, touching upon the way he lives to what he does with his leisure time to his romantic endeavors, is a desire to create order and structure through using the ephemeral material of the everyday. “Binx Bolling is the prototypical post-Renaissance character” Martyn Bone notes, as “he feels no particular sense of place or community, and he exhibits little interest in [Allen] Tate’s ‘past in the present.’” (156), rather using solely what he can find immediately in the present. Because of this, Binx's life embodies the Kierkegaardian notion of the aesthetic. In this period of "considered unseriousness," Binx aims to create meaning out of that which is meaningless, to create substance out of what is unsubstantial. What is particularly worth noting are the terms in which Binx's aesthetic stage and that quality to his life are determined, namely that they relate to modernity, whether it be new convinces or shifting notions of relationships and romance. Binx has "capitulate[d] to the ready-made attractions of the reigning culture, such as wealth and pleasure" (Search for Community 41) while appearing like

"the model of a well-adjusted young man in America in the late 1950s” (Kobre 22). “And yet,"

Kobre goes on to say, "there is something awry here" (22).

Binx's condition in the beginning of the novel and what dominates much of his outlook throughout the narrative of The Moviegoer is the aesthetic, but he progresses throughout the novel on through to the religious stage. For Binx, this desire to move beyond his everyday, seemingly superficial life comes in the form of his search, which he describes as "what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life" (TM 13). "The hero of

Percy's narrative world [...] realizing the bankruptcy of this pseudo-scientific view of the self, sets himself on a quest to find the truth" that "is to be in self-imposed exile" writes Julien Smith

(62), and Binx places himself in this exiled condition through his search as he attempts to take himself out of this aesthetically oriented way of living to something reconciled and engaged with his fellow man. Binx's initial realization of "the possibility of a search" is prompted as he

"dreamed of the war" and recalled being "under a chindolea bush" when "Six inches from [his] nose a dung beetle was scratching around under the leaves" and thus "there awoke in [him] an immense curiosity" (TM 10-11). Through a direct confrontation with mortality Binx finds " this fundamental human quest in the concrete particularity of the life-world" (Rosenberg 74), which reflects the nature of his search and foreshadows the approach one must take to ultimately be successful.

Binx's initial move into this is what he refers to as the "vertical" search, one that exists in that realm of abstraction. During that time of his life, Binx "read only 'fundamental books [...]

[he] stood outside the universe and sought to understand it" (TM 69). Binx "sought to understand the workings of the universe, without letting his own personal problems and feelings intrude," as

Robert Brinkmeyer describes it, but after finding this approach insufficient "he embarked on what he now sees as the more important quest, the 'horizontal' search, which is essentially an attempt to place himself in the universe" (Three Catholic Writers 130). This "vertical" search was based in Binx removing himself from the world, standing outside of the connections that one makes to the world, lacking the commitment to the world and fellow people that one should have to lead a life, in the Kierkegaardian terms, that is not of despair. Binx describes this horizontal search, what he attempts in the narrative of The Moviegoer, as being defined by "what [Binx] shall find when [he] leave[s] [his] room and wander[s] in the neighborhood" (TM 70). Binx's horizontal search is one that does not attempt to abstract or reduce but rather to experience the universe and situate himself in that universe. “Binx’s abstraction is such that this does not satisfy

him” Mark Sweeny writes, and “[t]here must be more. As a seeker he must have his reason for doing something” (16), which appears in the form of a search that seeks to situate himself within the world rather than by removing himself from it. While Binx begins this search with the

"vertical," calling to mind the ethical stage of Kierkegaard, what happens as he turns to this more

"horizontal" search is that his path can lead him toward the religious stage and the accompanying sense of meaning.

A force in Binx's life attempting to move him away from this aesthetic stage is his aunt

Emily. What she leads Binx towards, however, is not the religious stage that is described by

Kierkegaard, what for Percy would entail an acceptance about one's nature as that of the pilgrim, but rather towards the ethical or a stoicism that Percy firmly associated with the American South.

When an eight-year-old Binx's older brother dies, Emily says to him "it's all up to you. It's going to be difficult for you but I know you're going to act like a soldier" (TM 4). What Emily tries to instill in Binx is this respect for the order and tradition of the South and their family's station within it. At the end of the novel, after Binx's relationship with Kate is discovered, Emily scolds

Binx and speaks of how "our kind of folks have always possessed a native instinct for behavior, a natural pietry or grace" (TM 222). In his essay for Commonweal entitled "Stoicism and the

South," Percy describes how "[t]he greatness of the South [...] had always a stronger Greek flavor than it ever had a Christian. Its nobility and graciousness was the nobility and graciousness of the Old Stoa" (Signposts 84). John Sykes writes of how “[t]o Aunt Emily, the old order is slipping away, with aristocrats of her generation fighting a rearguard action against irresistible decline” (Aesthetic of Revelation 121) and it is because of this grounding in the stoic that she tries to appeal to Binx through these pre-existing traditions and obligations. Percy describes this approach in "Stoicism in the South" how "the Stoa of the South['s] [...] most

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characteristic mood was a poetic pessimism which took a grim satisfaction in the dissolution of its values—because social decay confirmed one in his original choice of the wintry kingdom of self [...] never more himself than when in a twilight victory of evil" (Signposts 85) as, in Emily's words, "goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man" (TM 54).

What Aunt Emily represents and brings into Binx’s life is the second stage of one’s development—the ethical. Emily’s grounding in a stoic or classical notion of order and morality displays this as Kierkegaard writes in Fear and Trembling of how "if the ethical life is the highest and nothing incommensurable is left over in man, except in the sense of what is evil [...] then one needs no other categories than those of the Greek philosophers, or whatever can be logically deduced from them" (84). In Either/Or, Kierkegaard makes distinguishes "between living esthetically and living ethically" is a matter of only one choice [...] I actually choose between good and evil, but I choose the good, I choose eo ipso the choice between good and evil” as that "original choice is forever present in every succeeding choice" and reflects one’s becoming “loose from the illusions of the esthetic and from the dreaming of a half-hearted despair" (219). The ethical stage moves beyond the aesthetic as it acknowledges that because a finite number of possibilities in life exists, one must acknowledge that good exists as a choice to be made. However, the ethical need not acknowledge the presence and role of the divine (which, for Kierkegaard, would be the God of Christianity). In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes how "[t]he ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which can be put from another point of view by saying that it applies at every moment. It rests immanently in itself, has nothing outside itself that is its telos [end, purpose] but is itself the telos for everything outside, and when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go" (83). It is this

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which Aunt Emily both believes in and represents as she hopes to maintain some sense of a de facto aristocracy in the modern world and amidst a changing world.

This sense of facing the oncoming wave of eradication with a dignity and poise is what gives a life meaning in the eyes of Binx's aunt and is what she wishes to impart to him, hoping to

"pass on [...] the heritage of the men of [their] family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly [...] the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in his life" (TM 224). Though feigning some kind of progress in terms of her views regarding matters of race, not expressing a full endorsement of the lost cause narrative that persists throughout the South, Emily outlines a supremacy that makes her and her kind better and set apart from the rest, a supremacy that exists for its own sake rather than any kind of acknowledgment of the absolute or God or things of that nature, as "the stoic point of view ultimately becomes self-defeating, for it can neither adapt to a changing world—in particular, a more egalitarian culture—nor provide hope for the future" (Kobre 33). What Emily believes in is

"the code that governed the southern aristos in spite of their nominal Christianity [...] its pagan ethos and its antagonism to the open-ended hope for the resurrected community-to-come signified by the Easter season" (Search for Community 76), a morality and belief system that has no real religious foundation or basis. But "This tension between being in the world," through his moviegoing and aesthetic grounding "or apart from it" through an ethical detachment like that of

Emily's "cannot be sustained indefinitely" (Kobre 50) and what Binx must do, and what Percy shows that one must do, is to be both in the world but also apart from it by reaching back to the past and traditions. While Aunt Emily would like to think that she, along with her time-tested virtues and sense of noblesse oblige, could help Binx lead a fulfilling life, Binx's movement into the religious stage, understanding himself as the pilgrim in these specific ways Percy was

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considering the concept, is precipitated more by his interactions with two other characters—Kate and Lonnie—and what they bring to Binx's attention.

Much of what leads Binx to a more satisfying conclusion, one in which he embraces his condition as homo viator, are his relationships and interactions with two characters—Kate and

Lonnie. Binx and Kate share something that John Desmond describes as "their mutual awareness of the 'abyss' of inauthenticity that surrounds them" (Search for Community 60). Kate says to

Binx at "You're like me, but worse. Much worse (TM 43). Mary Grabar describes Kate as

"further along than Binx [...] in the larger thematic scheme of the novel, act[ing] as a sort of spiritual guide to Binx" (124), observing how Kate's characterization challenges those readings of Percy's gender dynamics that emphasize the subservience and helplessness of his women characters. Much like Binx, for whom "that worst of times was one of the best" (TM 10), Kate speaks of her "happiest moment" after the accident that killed her fiancée Lyell she "got on the bus and went into Natchez [...] sailing along from bright sunshine through deep clefts as cool and dark as a springhouse" (TM 59-60). Much like Binx's realization of the search that occurred when he was wounded in war, Kate's own confrontation with mortality provides her with this moment of insight. Mary Howland notes that "Kate and Binx share the experience of feeling the emptiness of life and the anxiety that arises in response to that knowledge" (35), which comes from that confrontation and realization of mortality.

Another character with whom Binx connects is his half-brother Lonnie, who "serves as the key disclosure—the incarnate meaning—of the presence of God in the kind of personal and intersubjective matrix proper to religious experience" (Rosenberg 79). Binx describes how

Lonnie "has the gift of believing that he can offer his sufferings in reparation for men's indifference to the pierced heart of Jesus Christ" and a "life [that] is a serene business" (TM 137).

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Gary Ciuba notes how "Lonnie's communion with God finds its natural expression in his intimacy with Binx" (77), as Lonnie presents Binx with the religious while Binx affords Lonnie an opportunity to express his religious beliefs. Before Binx leaves his mother's house after visiting with Sharon Kincaid following their trip to the beach, Lonnie says "I am still offering my communion for you" (TM 165), offering up not only the sacrament but, as per Binx's horizontal search, the connection he seeks. Michael Kobre describes how "Binx and Lonnie embody

Gabriel Marcel's concept of intersubjectivity"10 (64), at which Binx's horizontal search is pointed towards. "Binx calls Lonnie a fellow moviegoer, but he is more than that. He is an archetypal

Percyesque wayfarer," Collin Messer describes, and since "[h]is severely broken body assures that his own dark journey in this world will be foreshortened, and so Lonnie is decidedly a pilgrim who is aware of his predicament" (24) and thus he seeks to affect Binx and help him realize those things that he has overlooked or forgotten.

Lonnie even brings out the religious element that exists within Binx when they talk about

Lonnie possessing "[a] disposition to envy" (TM 163) particularly regarding his brother Duval, whom died earlier. Though Lonnie has "accused [him]self and received absolution" he still feels guilt about it to which Binx replies "don't be scrupulous" (TM 163) Binx seems to seriously credit the substance and language of sacramental confession (absolution and grace received) and the value of Holy Communion. By encouraging Lonnie to "concentrate on the Eucharist" (TM

163) rather than these more scrupulous matters, "Binx seems to seriously credit the substance and language of sacramental confession (absolution and grace received) and the value of Holy

Communion" (Desmond "Confessions" 135), which reflects a nascent religious impulse in Binx that Lonnie can bring out because of his connection to Binx. When introducing the search, Binx seems to say that God is not what he searches for, saying “everyone knows, the polls report that

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98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics—which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker” (TM 14), which is what Binx sees himself as.

However, what Binx appears to have meant as he “hesitate[s] to answer” (TM 13) whether God is the aim of the search was what most think God is or what they have been told

God is. For Binx, God cannot be "reduced to a profane category in a pollster's survey or to the climax of a theologian's syllogism," Gary Ciuba writes, as "[p]roofs of God's existence speak out of abstract induction, as if God were a law of physics, rather than to the unique predicament of the searcher" (70), keeping him from initially seeing a religious move as a component of his search. But through his encounters with Lonnie, Binx can feel this authentic religious compulsion bear fruit. Kieran Quinlan describes how "Lonnie [...] inspire[s] the protagonist to undertake a religious search or at least to keep such an option open. In spite of his maladies,

Lonnie remains a devout believer, especially in the rather pious consolations of popular

Catholicism which he somehow manages to make striking and novel" (95), eliciting this religious reaction from Binx.

What characterizes of these relationships, and what sets them apart from the other ones in his life, is how they allow Binx to experience this connection with another in a non-abstract manner as he interacts with them as fellow subjects rather than objects. While many of Binx's relationships, with Sharon being the greatest example of this, are based upon interacting with others in a way that treats them as objects or in a disconnected way, he engages with Kate and

Lonnie both in a way that acknowledges their individuality and treats them as such. Preston

Browning writes of "Marcel's conviction that there can be no such thing as selfhood apart from relationship and interpersonal communion, what he is fond of calling intersubjectivity" (279) and much of Binx's progress comes through those acts of interpersonal communion with Kate and

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Lonnie. What these relationships also offer Binx is the means by which he can move into the religious stage and away from the over association with the present and its aesthetic pleasures as well as from the rigid and stoic ethical realm represented by Emily. Both because of his actions with them as well as what they elicit from him, Binx can move into that third stage that is present but also acknowledged an absolute good that goes beyond the present. It elicits a shift in his behavior, albeit a small and subtle but nevertheless meaningful, that reflects his progress as well as his greater ability to reconcile past with present.

Binx's actions at the novel's end—marrying Kate, enrolling in medical school, and subtlety alluding to a returned religious faith—exhibit the progress he has made in his search.

Though "one never ceases to be homo viator, one who must search for ways to become more open to the ambiguous but real ontological presence that surrounds the individual like a sea. The victory [...] lies in the search itself, a search made in hope and good faith, and most importantly, a search made in the company of other people" (Howland 4-5), what the novel's ending reflects is

Binx's greater understanding of his condition as homo viator and his movement into that third stage in Kierkegaard's framework and "initiat[ing]what appears to be a double movement—a leap of religious faith and an ethical commitment" (Browning 281). Binx has made this leap, this movement into a properly religious stage, by reconciling those traditions of the past with the modern world that he lives in, not keeping them separate but rather bringing the two together. As

Richard Pindell describes Binx, he has "sift[ed] the ruins, making free with sacred relics" (228), finding what he must take with him from the past as he continues to make his way through this present.

Binx’s state at the novel’s end also reflects his movement into the third and final stage in

Kierkegaard’s construction, that of the religious stage. At this point, one builds on the ethical

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while including an engagement with the divine or absolute that goes beyond those mere ethics and involves a commitment to the absolute or the divine, the thing "outside itself" that is the end or the purpose for the ethical. Kierkegaard describes this relationship in Fear and Trembling, speaking of how "faith's paradox is [...] that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual [...] determines his relation to the universal through his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute through his relation to the universal [...] It doesn't follow, nevertheless, that [the ethical] is to be done away with. Only that it gets quite different expression, the paradoxical expression [...] Unless this is how it is, faith has no place in existence" (97-98). Moving into the religious and acknowledging an absolute does not preclude the ethical but rather that one's relationship to the universal law is arrived at by one's relationship to the absolute. As Janet Hobbs describes in her essay focusing on these stages and their presence in in The Moviegoer, "[t]he difference between the religious and the ethical is that the ethical is based on a relationship between the universal [...] and the particular [...] whereas the religious view is based on a particular (individual) relation between God and man. With the achievement of a religious view, ethical principles are subordinated but not necessarily annihilated. The religious sphere is a paradox involving complete resignation or surrender to God [...] followed by the leap of faith through which the universal is returned not by man but by God" (38-39). It is this stage that, when one arrives at it, they can live a full and complete life, understanding both the universal, ethical morality as well as the religious absolute that exists around it.

Part of Binx’s movement into this stage of life and existence can be seen in his greater commitment to Kate, whom he introduces to Sharon Kincaid's roommate as "[his] own fiancée"

(TM 231) while Kate tells Aunt Emily that they "are to be married" (TM 232). Through his marriage to Kate, Binx has made what Paul Giles describes as "a Pascalian bet, a leap of hope

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and faith rather than true knowledge" (368) into this new stage of his life, one in keeping with the idea that "one never ceases to be homo viator." There is no certainty or defined answers for

Binx in this stage but he is more reconciled with existence and better able to exist because of this shift. In the novel's final scene, the strengthened connection between Kate and Binx can be seen.

Binx tells Kate that he will "be up here all day with Lonnie and the children" and thus asks her to

"go downtown [...] and pick up some governments at the office" since "[her] mother has decided again to keep them at home" (TM 241). As she prepares to leave, Kate asks Binx if he'll "be thinking about" her while she's gone and says that since she will "sit next to the window on the

Lake side and put the cape jasmine in [her] lap" and for Binx to "be thinking of [her] just that way" (TM 242). The connection Binx formed with her, with another human, is apparent and thus the work of the search is on display as Binx and Kate understand one another and can share in experience rather than feeling isolated and disconnected. "Kate can find the courage to perform this task only if she feels Binx's presence throughout," Preston Browning observes, and "will risk her fragile self in an adventure so long as she knows that wherever she goes and whomever she meets she is not alone" (286). John Sykes notes how "faith, in the sense of a real connection to

God, seems in short supply. But Binx, by novel's end, seems to have found such faith" (Aesthetic of Revelation 130), reflected in the real connection that Binx has with Kate. "A wayfarer by definition is a man who is not at home but on the road" Martin Luschei writes and thus

"[s]alvation for the wayfarer is better conceived as a road than as a state. He is a pilgrim on a journey toward the light" (38). By the novel's end, it is clear that Binx has been pointed towards that light.

Binx also displays real religious belief in the novel's epilogue. Binx tells his brothers and sisters that Lonnie will in fact die but that "he wouldn't want you to be sad" and when one of his

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brothers asks "[w]hen Our Lord raises us up on the last day, will Lonnie still be in a wheelchair or will he be like us?" Binx responds by saying "[h]e'll be like you" (TM 239-240). This statement Binx makes acknowledges, very subtlety, the Resurrection that is a major part of

Christian faith and belief, particularly the Catholicism that Percy both believed in and made present in his novel. John Edward Hardy highlights how the "thematic connection is clear" in this action by Binx as "[i]t is entirely fitting that the story which began with Binx's recollection of his first, temporary deliverance from dunghood, on the floor of the Korean forest, should end with his specific avowal of faith in the Resurrection" (36). Binx not only presents an admission of faith and religious belief, one done in a small way that reflects the how "the Binx of the novel's close has undergone some subtle and important changes" (Poteat 68), showing this through an acknowledgment of the resurrection. As Binx has brought himself away from the despair and the metaphorical death that comes by being trapped in the everyday, he has brought himself back to life and thus affirming religious belief by pointing to the doctrine of the Resurrection of the dead would be most appropriate.

Binx's decision to pursue a career in medicine and to attend medical school reflects this newfound commitment and belief that goes beyond the temporary pleasures of the aesthetic.

Binx's choice for employment and career where Percy begins the narrative reflected his entrapment in the aesthetic stage. As the novel starts, Binx works as "a stock and bond broker" as a way of "giving up such grand ambitions and living the most ordinary life imaginable, a life without the old longings" (TM 9). Virginia Osborne argues how "the concept of making money— of wealth in and of itself—provides more satisfaction than any other activity" for Binx "because it is satisfying without requiring much thought or personal investment" (116), as Binx's choice in career reflects his detachment and disengagement in the other areas of his life. Binx's aunt, by

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contrast, believes that Binx has "a keen mind and a natural scientific curiosity" and possesses "a flair for research" (TM 51) he should be acting upon. But though Emily "want[s] [Binx] to think about entering medical school this fall" (TM 52), this desire is grounded in a stoic (or, in the

Kierkegaardian framework, ethical) conception of things. Binx describes how "for [Emily] the fabric is dissolving, but for her even the dissolving makes sense. She understands the chaos to come [...] [Binx's] duty in life is simple. [He] go[es] to medical school [...] live[s] a long useful life serving [his] fellowman" (TM 54). Emily's desire for Binx to head down this path is driven less by an acceptance of the absolute that informs all forms of ethics and morality but rather by a sense of superiority and that it is what one should do because of their station in life as an act of noblesse oblige. "Binx's decision to attend medical school," Janet Hobbs notes, "though it may appear to be capitulation to Emily's aspirations, instead demonstrates a harmonious balance, a synthesis which establishes his authenticity and eternal validity" (47), reflecting Binx's acknowledgment of the religious and that he is now pointed towards the newfound belief that he has discovered.

Binx has made this shift, which can be seen "in sharp contrast with the rest of the novel" as "the epilogue contains not a single reference to movies or moviegoing" (Nash 135) and has taken actions out of his newly found religious sensibility and rather than those things that his

Aunt Emily had placed upon him. This choice, much like his commitment to Kate in the form of marriage, is the leap of faith that Kierkegaard describes, as John Desmond notes that Binx's

"chosen vocation of medicine [...] suggests a new care for others and a sense of their communal destiny, a turn away from the egoistic consumerism of the culture at large" (Search for

Community 78), one that his previous life reflected. By moving into the discipline and practice of medicine, Binx is interacting with the world in which he is living, no longer retreating from it in

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the form of aesthetic detachment or through the stoic values of his aunt Emily but rather attempting to move throughout it and have some form of positive effect. This shift made by Binx in the novel is one looking forward and progressing rather a change that is reactive and retreating. As Mary Deems Howland writes, “[t]hrough his commitment to Kate, Binx rejoins the human community […] he still does not have all the answers for which he was searching [but] his words here indicate that he will be more available to his fellow beings in the future, that his intention now is to be a participant as well as a spectator” (40), something that could be applied to the other choices Binx makes at the novel’s end as well. By understanding his narrative in this way—Binx moving towards a recommitment to his fellow men and the world in which they live—those readings of Percy's critique of the world and Binx's actions that represent them as a strictly conservative or traditional stand out as being short sighted and flawed.

In the existential terminology with which Percy was so familiar, we can understand

Binx's movement as the Kierkegaardian leap of faith or an embrace of intersubjectivity as defined by Gabriel Marcel. Binx's state at the end of the novel and the process he undertakes throughout the narrative of The Moviegoer displays Percy's connection to the modern world and how an individual (or homo viator) must navigate it, a sensibility that was in keeping with the spirit and reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Though not a direct reaction to the Council,

Binx and the ways he represents the qualities of the pilgrim condition reflects a similar view of the world and its relationship with the traditions of the past. Much like Flannery O'Connor, Percy is an author whose fiction engaged with Catholicism within its context (America and the mid- twentieth century) rather than one decidedly disconnected from his time and place.

Beyond merely noting Percy's protagonist as being an exemplar of Marcel's wayfaring man, “one who is on a journey, alone, searching for his destination, of a God-made being who

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has a destiny and completion beyond earth, and upon which his individuality, sovereignty, and freedom are based” (Sweeny 10), what one sees in The Moviegoer is Percy’s connection to the world in which he lived and wrote. At the time Percy wrote The Moviegoer, the Catholic Church was reconsidering its place within the modern world, which would lead to the convocation and reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Though the final decisions of the Council would not be implemented until after The Moviegoer's publication, the forces and impetus for change was building before its invocation and there existed a "spirit" of the Second Vatican Council that transcended the dates on the calendar. What the Church sought to do through the Council was to stress its status as a "pilgrim church." As Lawrence Cunningham writes in The Catholic Faith:

An Introduction, "Because the pilgrim Church is 'not yet there,' it has not attained its purpose; it has not yet fulfilled its promise; it is in via" and should "be thought of as an organic community on a voyage toward a goal" (61-63). Though it would manifest itself in numerous forms and changes, the aggiornamento that Pope John XXIII called for was one that made this pilgrim condition central to the Church and its identity as "[t]o be a Catholic, however, does not mean only to be a link with a past tradition [but] also to be present and hopeful toward the future"

(Cunningham 168).

Understanding this pilgrim concept does not just align Percy with that philosophy but also grounds the author in his particular historical context as this philosophy is in keeping with the discussions involving the Catholic Church in America at the time. Percy's connections to an

American literature are, in part by his own assertions,11 tenuous at best which causes Percy to not be read as close to the American cultural milieu as he ought to be. In many ways, Percy's plight mirrors that of his fellow Catholic author Flannery O'Connor where there "has been the general tendency in O'Connor criticism: assigning priority to the 'universal' religious themes with which

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her stories of the Bible Belt resonate [...] The theological approach has deepened our understanding of O'Connor, but it has also excluded her from most analyses of American fiction that turn on social or political issues" (Bacon 5), words that could easily apply to Percy as well both in relation to America and his relationship with the "modern" world. However, Percy’s relationship to the issues and his historical context mirrors Binx who, as described by Max

Webb, “is in his society but not of it […] both insider and outsider” (1). Though he critiques aspects of modernity and reaches back to a faith and belief that transcends the present moment,

Percy does not reject or wholly condemn that present moment as well, instead taking the approach of homo viator and attempting to navigate between the two, an act mirrored by the institution of the Catholic Church as that time.

Within the work of Walker Percy persists an idea of man that sees his condition as inherently that of the pilgrim. This is seen in his 1962 novel The Moviegoer with Binx moving away from a life based upon the temporary satisfaction of aesthetic pleasures and meaningless order by taking a leap into a life that acknowledges an absolute with which one engages while navigating the present world, specifically through his marriage to Kate and decision to go into the practice of medicine. Beyond creating a fiction that reflected this conception of man, what

Percy's engagement with these ideas reflects are the ways in which he connected to the discourse surrounding Catholics in places like America in the mid-twentieth century. By understanding

Percy as someone who sought to reconcile traditions and absolute truths within the modern and present world in which he lived rather than one who turned away from that world, the ways in which he is an author of the moment of the Second Vatican Council becomes a bit more clear.

What Percy identifies as the true definition of man, and what is displayed throughout his fiction

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but particularly in works of the mid-twentieth century like The Moviegoer as well as The Last

Gentleman, is that man is the pilgrim.

While Percy outwardly represented the most orthodox or strictly Catholic iteration of this, this understanding of man persisted throughout American Catholic art and fiction in the mid-twentieth century to extend to authors that did not stand on quite the same theological or philosophical footing as Percy. Thus an author like Jack Kerouac, of whom Percy said, "[t]here is no ethics involved there, it's a search for authentic experience [...] By finding it he means that he has found the right spot in California or Mexico, he has the right companions and they're drinking the right booze or taking the right drugs and they have great feelings [...] substituted for ethics in the American novel" (More Conversations 76), can be read as having an ethical or religious charge to his writing because he too shares this emphasis on mankind's pilgrim nature.

Scholars such as Philip Simmons write of Percy's 1962 novel having "a spiritual affinity with works such as Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road [...] the first novel of John Updike's Rabbit trilogy, Rabbit Run [...] John Cheever's short stories [...] and the fiction of J.D. Salinger" (605) yet never think of Kerouac and his famous novel On The Road, a work that shares much with those aforementioned works of fiction, as having any similar affinity. Rather than being someone who merely sought pleasurable experiences while giving into a sense of wanderlust, Kerouac and his penchant for the road and traveling fits along this conception of man that Percy endorsed and explored as he took this notion of the pilgrim condition of man and depicted it in an external way. If, as Martin Luschei correctly notes "[t]he term wayfarer comes from Marcel [...] A wayfarer by definition is a man who is not at home but on the road" (37) and so much of Percy is built upon this Marcel-ian notion of the man as wayfarer then he would certainly possess a connection to an author who wrote a book entitled On The Road.

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CHAPTER 3

JACK KEROUAC

"Oh come take my hand, we’re riding out tonight to case the promised land.” Bruce Springsteen, “Thunder Road”

While authors such as Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy were known in their time for the literature they crafted that engaged with matters of theology and philosophy, earning each critical distinction and publications in prominent publications for creating a truly American

Catholic literary aesthetic, a more popular and populist literary movement occurred simultaneously and a literary star was rising. In 1957, Jack Kerouac's novel On The Road was published and ushered the "Beat Generation" into the American literary consciousness. Though the authors and poets that made up this movement had achieved a degree of notoriety from Allen

Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems and the subsequent obscenity trial, the publication of

Kerouac's novel and the subsequent fervor launched those writers into a different stratosphere.

Kerouac's novel helped launch a movement that had a profound effect, both in America and the world at large, shaping the cultural and political changes that would define the 1960s. However, while Kerouac was cast as this countercultural figure, inspiring the hippies and other elements of sixties counterculture, his literary celebrity and association with Ginsberg and the other Beats obfuscates a perhaps more vital and central concerns of his writing. What emerges is a specifically Catholic sensibility in Kerouac that deepens and grounds his so-called Beat revolution and grounds his literary aesthetic in the same concerns and assumptions stimulating other more obviously American Catholic writers working at that same time. For Kerouac, the

Catholic sensibility pervaded his entire life, even his interest in Buddhism. Between Kerouac’s constant eliding of Christ and the Buddha, his emphasis on ritual action in his Buddhist practices

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(calling to mind the ritual so central to Catholic belief and practice), or Gary Snyder’s recollection of Keroauc’s “thinking too much about how the world’s a bad place” (Gifford and

Lee 203) that appears close to a Catholic notion of sin, his foray into Buddhist thought was still done as a Catholic and does not diminish the importance of Catholicism to Kerouac and our understanding of him. By turning an eye towards Kerouac's biography, upon which he directly drew from in his fiction, along with the aesthetic parameters he established for himself and understanding the relationship between biography and aesthetics, what one can see is a sensibility that is revolutionary less in a political sense or in the guise of a proto-hippie but rather as one seeking how one lives in the modern world while maintaining a connection to the past and religious traditions.

As an author whose fiction was rooted in his autobiographical experience, an understanding of Kerouac's personal history is necessary to grasp the work he performs in fiction.12 The relationship between Kerouac's own life and the material of his fiction is a symbiotic one. But it is important to note that Kerouac's work is to be considered as fiction, as

Nancy Grace notes, writing that Kerouac "maintained with equal fervor that he was writing fiction" as through "a fusion of novelistic and autobiographical elements, Kerouac brought to literary life [...] a viable character related to but distinct from his historic creator" (4, 25). The relationship between Kerouac's own life and his fiction can be understood in that way, "related to but distinct from," as we can better grasp Kerouac's fiction by understanding the aspects of his life that provided the source material for his fiction, though it is important that we not suppose that his fiction is to be regarded as fact. Tim Hunt highlights this specific quality in On The

Road, writing "Sal is certainly an image of Kerouac but an image which Kerouac uses to measure his own growth and to explore his interactions with his cultural heritage" (Kerouac's

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Crooked Road 5), again identifying the relationship between Kerouac's protagonist and the author yet making it clear they are not one in the same. Keeping this distinction in mind, we shall see that a brief appraisal of the most important aspects of Kerouac's biography is vital to our understanding of Kerouac's fiction and how the misinterpretations of Kerouac and his work obscure the actual lessons of his biography and how they manifest themselves in his writing.

Kerouac was raised in Lowell, the child of French-Canadian immigrants to Lowell from

Quebec. Part of Kerouac's sense of himself as an outsider and the distance he felt from most people emerges because of this. Consequently, he had generally been read as someone seeking to escape and even rebelling against the idea of "home." Yet, his relationship to Lowell, reveals one of complicated creativity and even continuity with the artist and person he aspired to become.

Those years were "a time in his life the he never tired of reconsidering and recreating in his writing, approaching it again and again from different angles" (Gifford and Lee 6). Paul Giles notes how "Kerouac's French-Canadian heritage impairs full commitment to the American

Dream of the 1950s" (407), that aspect of his heritage closely linked with both his hometown and his Catholicism creating distance between him and the most prevalent notions of America.

Kerouac's initial experiences with language, however, placed him on the outside, speaking primarily French throughout his early life and even "[a]t eighteen Jack would still be speaking

'halting' English" (Nicosia 32), having spent most of his in childhood in parochial schools where he could primarily speak French. Tim Hunt engages with this as well when he writes "Kerouac's

Quebecois heritage was plausibly a factor in his sensitivity to the differences between speaking and writing as modes of language" (Textuality of Soulwork 20), pointing to that aspect of his life as something that would create a sense of alienation within him.

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Kerouac's relationship with his family, particularly his mother and his older brother

Gerard, had a profound influence upon him and the fiction he would create. The Kerouac home was dominated by Gabrielle, "[a] devout Catholic" who "looked to her religion for solace" in the face of many family tragedies and missteps (Nicosia 24). Kerouac’s mother was a woman that poet Philip Whalen described as "a practicing Catholic who went frequently to church and confession, and who wore religious medals pinned to the strap of her slip" (Gifford and Lee

217). When coupled with this mother's doting on him and the closeness between the two

(particularly, as we shall see, in the wake of the death of Kerouac's brother Gerard), the author

"inherited his mother's penchant for the divine [...] endow[ing] him with a visionary perspective on the world" (Grace 2). Kerouac's older brother, Gerard, also played a large role in Kerouac’s development and sense of the world. The beloved child in the Kerouac family, Gerard was revered for his seeming holiness as "[t]o Gabrielle [Kerouac's mother] there was no question that

Gerard was a saint, and Jacky was told so again and again" (Gifford and Lee 5). Gerard "would feed hungry neighbor children, and explain the importance of kindness to four-year-old Jackie as if Jackie were his mental equal," as "[i]n the eyes of both his mother and the nuns who taught him, Gerard was progressing into martyred sainthood" (Nicosia 25), a martyrdom they believed occurred when Gerard died from a rheumatic fever at age nine.

The example Gerard set for Jack was indelible and transcended the Kerouac matriarch's reverence for her oldest son as "Gerard taught Ti Jean saintliness almost like Jesus handing over the keys of the Kingdom to his chosen disciple. On Sunday afternoons he would lead Ti Jean by the hand around the Stations of the Cross outside the Franco-American Orphanage" (Nicosia 26).

Gerard ushered Jack into the ways and teachings of Catholicism. In addition to this, Gerard initiated the young Jack into the way of the road as well, taking him through those outdoor

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Stations of the Cross in Lowell and setting the stage for the connection that he would feel with

Neal Cassady (which would be portrayed in On The Road in the relationship between Dean

Moriarty and Sal Paradise). Between the Kerouac family and the "ceremonious mourning by the teaching sisters [as] Gerard had been a favorite of the nuns" and "[w]hen he died, they thought over things that he had said and done in his brief life and spoke of him as a saint-in-the-making"

(Gifford and Lee 5), the death of Gerard was an important event amongst the Kerouacs. But

Gerard’s death had a profound effect on Jack, who would say later in life "that in some way this family tragedy [Gerard's death] explained him" (Johnson 3).These two factors, the strong presence of his mother and the life and early death of his older brother, worked together to establish in Kerouac an almost inescapable worldview imbued in a rich an omnipresent

Catholicism.

The image of Kerouac as a devout Catholic struggling to express his devotion in his fiction contrasts with the popular and celebrity-saturated image that was placed upon him following On The Road's publication. He was cast as the vanguard of a cultural rebellion that was creating upheaval in America, an author presenting the young reading public of America with the idea that crime and criminality were the appropriate and just way to rebuke the more stultifying and conformist world in which they found themselves. This notion of Kerouac as one who “radicalized the central tenet of political liberalism […] personal liberty” (Adamo 43) to an extreme and sometimes destructive degree by creating a novel that played to young people's

"superficial fascination with hipsters, wanderlust, sex, and drugs" or what was viewed as "the usual trappings of Beat literature" (Weinreich xv) fundamentally undervalues Kerouac's aims and vision as a writer (not a cultural or political figure) and in turn prevents one from acknowledging

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the literary vision and ambitions Kerouac possessed as well as the ways in which his fiction connects to much of the American Catholic literature produced at the same time.

On The Road's publication and subsequent canonization in the New York Times afforded

Kerouac an inevitable degree of celebrity and notoriety that made him a symbol, in the public eye, for disaffected, alienated, and rebellious youth culture. In that review, Gilbert Millstein compared On The Road to Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, writing "Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, the Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the 'Lost

Generation,' so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the 'Beat

Generation.'" (Beat Down Your Soul 410). By foregrounding the importance of Kerouac as a cultural figure and one around whom a "generation" of alienated or disaffected young people would coalesce, Kerouac's deeper literary aims were obfuscated. Rather than a writer “more important” for producing a work understood “as a myth, as a cultural marker [rather] than as a novel” (Dickstein 101) as he was seen by the world at large, Kerouac was like O’Connor and

Percy as he engaged with his turbulent American present from a Catholic literary orientation, showing man’s condition as one navigating between the spiritual and the physical, discovering the divine in the midst of the modern world. Thus the ways in which Kerouac and the themes expressed in his fiction challenged the modern culture of the time were not in the way in which he was popularly read but rather through a rebellion based around religion. Kerouac, in many ways, set out to perform his own Second Vatican Council as he sought to find and understand the place and existence of God in the modern world, an interpretation of Kerouac that is lost if the prepackaged narrative of Kerouac as a law-breaking rebel writer is taken at face value.

While the content of Kerouac's fiction was drawn directly from the experiences of his life, so too did his life affect and manifest itself in his aesthetic sensibility. Kerouac's greatest

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formal contribution to American literature is the cultivation of what he described as the

"spontaneous prose method." Kerouac developed an idea of literature rooted in spontaneity and action rather than contemplation, finding inspiration in bebop musicians like Charlie Parker who moved jazz toward a more improvisational style and away from the regimented and orderly conceptions like swing and big band more prevalent in the early decades of the twentieth century. Kerouac developed a style, an artifice whose defining feature was its lack of artifice, aesthetics that were a lack of conscious aesthetics.

Kerouac sought to create fiction that was different from the overly crafted notion of the literary, something associated with an elite class removed from the people and the language that exists outside of the sanitized literary spaces. James E. B. Breslin writes of how within American poetry in the mid-twentieth century, "[t]he prestige and influence of Eliot, as reinvented by the

New Critics, are enormous by the mid-fifties [...] His influence was not so much specifically literary [...] but one associated with a specific set of attitudes and values, subtly defining the expectations of many readers and editors [...] this influence was transmitted most powerfully by the New Critics" (14-15), but his assessment could apply to fiction as well. The New Criticism codified and canonized Modernism and its writers within the American literary and academic world, making a literature steeped in difficulty and obscurity the dominant mode by the mid- twentieth century. Jason Haslam notes Kerouac’s emergence as a major literary figure occurs “at the tail-end of the paradoxically radical conservatism of American high modernism and New

Criticism” while in a way “look[ing] forward to the equally radical questioning of the counter- cultures of the 1960s and, later, of postmodernism” (444). Kerouac's literary aesthetic moved away from those rarefied, enclosed notions of literature ensconced in concepts of High Art.

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Instead, Kerouac emphasized orality, immediacy, and subjective experience, concepts that would be taken to even fuller and more radical ends with the development of postmodernism.

This approach, which Kerouac espoused and used in his works after his first novel The

Town and the City, can be understood as "confessional" and resembling the Sacrament of

Penance in the Catholic Church as Kerouac "relinquishes control of language to God [to] speak unpremeditatedly the language of the Holy Ghost" (Grace 28). By "not [using] 'selectivity' of expression but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought" and believing in "no revisions (except obvious rational mistakes, such as names or calculated insertions in act of not writing but inserting" ("Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" 484-

485), Kerouac sought to limit the impediments in between what Kerouac perceived and wished to transform into fiction and the act of putting words on the page, what Ann Charters describes as

"uninterrupted and unrevised full confessions about what actually happened" (Kerouac: A

Bibliography 23). Kerouac's spontaneous method takes on these confessional qualities, in a

Catholic sense of that word, as “Kerouac’s traditional French-Canadian, Roman Catholic upbringing is also felt in the rhythmic quality of his Spontaneous Prose style, which echoes the ritualistic, chant-like musicality of prayer” (Jackson 282). Writing, for Kerouac, was a penitential act, an act of confession and a prayer offered up to God.

Much discussion had concerned where the term "Beat" and the philosophy behind it came from and what exactly it means, both amongst the authors and poets that made up the Beat

Generation as well as critics and scholars and observers of the movement. Part of this idea comes from the interest in jazz prevalent amongst Kerouac and his cohort. To be a "beat generation" means to be connected to a rhythm or pulse, one not unlike that which provided the foundation around which bebop's great improvisers like Charlie Parker and Lester Young would work. The

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"beat" concept was also linked with a sense of world weariness, a "beaten down" quality. There was a sense amongst those writers that the world, particularly America, had taken those who did not fit in and worn them down into either submission or destruction. Those who made up the

Beat Generation and defined what it meant to be "beat" felt as though they did not belong in an

America that was moving towards a more homogenized and corporate culture, not fitting into the predominant paradigm and thus casting them as outcasts to be trampled on by the masses, ideas reflected upon in Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro.”

But the most philosophically and aesthetically interesting interpretation of the meaning of

"Beat" emerges from Kerouac and his religious background, as he roots the concept in the beatitudes and the beatific vision. Kerouac outlines this in "Beatific: On the Origins of the Beat

Generation," juxtaposing those "who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality" (572) with his vision of what Beat meant, referring to how "it was as a

Catholic [...] that [he] went one afternoon to the church of [his] childhood [...] and had a vision of what [he] must have really meant with 'Beat' anyhow [...] the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific" (571). What many readers took away from Kerouac's writing, particularly from

On The Road, was a belief that the author was espousing lawlessness and a more confrontational notion of rebellion. While Kerouac did envision the Beat Generation as something being countercultural or contrary to mainstream American life of the time, “express[ing] a subversive set of values […] that would challenge the suburban and corporate conservativism of the 1950s”

(Dickstein 96), he framed it as a religiously influenced act of rebellion. Beat for Kerouac comes specifically from Beatitudes preached by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount as Kerouac saw himself and the people like him as being the "poor in spirit [...] those who mourn [...] the meek

[...] the merciful [...] the pure in heart [...] the peacemakers" of their time who will be blessed and

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whose "reward is great in heaven” (NRSV, Matthew 5:3-12). Thus Kerouac created a fiction that both spoke to and was about these people, that resonates in some way with those whom would be considered to be the least by a heavily consumerist and dehumanizing American culture. To be

"beat" and a member of the Beat Generation, in Kerouac's estimation, was to be aligned with those ideas, and thus his fiction in turn reflects this and bears that Catholic point of inspiration.

Whether when referring to his Spontaneous Prose Method and its connection to the

Sacrament of Penance or the idea of a Beat Generation and its religious connotations, Kerouac’s literary aesthetics are steeped in Catholicism. The themes and ideas explored in Kerouac’s fiction are also closely aligned with a worldview that is not just Catholic but specifically reflecting the life and the perception of an American Catholic living in the mid-twentieth century. Kerouac's fiction engages with the same conception of man-as-pilgrim that informed so much of O'Connor and Percy's fiction and manifested in the Church itself through the reforms of the Second Vatican

Council. Michael Amundsen describes how On The Road “is a compelling ethnographic portrait of the United States in the middle of the last century. […] display[ing] a common ethos with those anthropologists who seek epistemological openness based on experience and an absence of abstraction” (32) and we might understand Kerouac doing something similar in terms of religion, crafting a narrative that represents the midcentury American Catholic experience not in an ethnographic form but rather representing the ideas that would be most important to the midcentury American Catholic mind.

For O'Connor and Percy, those authors who explicitly drew upon their Catholicism, the wanderlust embraced by some as well as a turn to automotive culture reflected a turn away from

God and the divine. Brian Ragen notes that "O'Connor uses the automobile most often as an image of complete personal freedom—freedom from the past, freedom from responsibility,

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freedom even from God" (55). Percy, specifically addressing Kerouac, speaks of this as well as he describes how "[t]here is no ethics involved there, it's a search for authentic experience [...]

By finding it he means that he has found the right spot in California or Mexico, he has the right companions and they're drinking the right booze or taking the right drugs and they have great feelings [...] substituted for ethics in the American novel" (More Conversations 76). Binx even eschews “a comfortable, conservative and economical two-door sedan for a “little red MG” that he uses as “immnun[ity] to the malaise” (TM 121-122), using the excitement of the fast-yet- unreliable car as a way of putting off confronting the despair within his own life. In O'Connor and Percy’s conceptions, the automobile serves as a false substitute for God and divine grace while the life of the road reflects a detachment from the larger questions of man and his relationship to the divine.

However, the traveling and movement undertaken by Kerouac's fictional alter-ego, Sal

Paradise or (as he is called in Kerouac’s other novels) Jack Duluoz, is not an example of mere itinerancy or aimless wanderlust. Rather, what Kerouac does is to take the rising automotive culture and the freedom afforded to people through and depict it as a means of performing penance that reaffirms the pilgrim nature of man, showing a quest for God and connection amidst a modern world that might be opposed to that. Jason Vredenburg identifies the flaws in “reading the novel [On The Road] as a celebration of the power and freedom of the individual [as it] obscures its interest in community and, specially, in the automobile as a tool to create and strengthen relationships among individuals, fashioning new forms of communal experience”

(172), notions that connect to many Catholic ideas that would be present in Kerouac’s mind as he wrote the novel. This quality of Kerouac's writing becomes more apparent when one turns to an overlooked and under considered novel in Kerouac's oeuvre—Visions of Gerard. This novel

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reveals is the larger structure of Kerouac's writing of which On The Road was a part. The

Catholicism that informs Kerouac's writing and his literary project, notably that it emphasizes man's condition as that of the pilgrim and thus forced to navigate the modern world, can be best understood after one considers one of Kerouac's less popular works and how it connects to and reveals things about On The Road.

Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard, which fictionalizes the life and death of Kerouac's brother Gerard while also examining the relationship between Gerard and the narrating protagonist and the influence Gerard played, illuminates Kerouac's larger literary project (the

Legend of Duluoz) into which Kerouac's most famous novel (On The Road) fits. What Visions of

Gerard makes clear is the larger forms and structures of Kerouac's fiction, giving not just structure to Kerouac's Legend but also giving it a purpose or motivation. In addition, Visions of

Gerard makes it clear that the impetus for Kerouac's fiction came from a very Catholic place and he created a fiction that was philosophically in step with the experience of a Vatican II-era

American Catholic.

Kerouac was not interested in aimless wandering or delinquency, as one might assume based upon the more popular and prevalent readings of the author. Rather, Kerouac was more interested in an examination of man's condition as the pilgrim in the modern world. His work aligns with the Catholic literary sensibility of mid-twentieth century America who, in mirroring the eventual reforms of the Second Vatican Council, emphasized the importance of that pilgrim nature. While Luke Ferretter identifies in Kerouac a “pluralism […] belief that revelations of the nature of a reality that transcends the phenomenal world [that] can be found in numerous beliefs and practices” (410) as the Beats “embody one of the major trajectories of twentieth-century

American literature: a search […] for that transcendent reality that Americans have most

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frequently called God” (419); As Catholicism engaged with the modern world in such a way that led to a more pluralistic conception of itself and its relationship to other religious faiths, examinations spurred on in part by the rise of America as a major country for the Catholic faith,

Kerouac too sought to answer these questions in his own and the individual’s life through his “a generic, representative man, a contemporary Everyman” (Stephenson 49) of a protagonist.

Published in 1963, Visions of Gerard was one of many books Kerouac wrote in the years between composing On The Road in 1951 and its publication in 1957. Only after Kerouac published On The Road, gaining the celebrity and notoriety that came with it, could Kerouac publish Visions of Gerard. While not a work not in step with the manic and frenetic pace at the surface of On The Road and Kerouac's other novels of his life traveling across the country,

Visions of Gerard illuminates the larger vision Kerouac had for his writing and the more contemplative and thoughtful heart to his literary project that transcended those more popular misconceptions. By looking at Visions of Gerard and considering it as an explanatory text for the larger structures and movements of Kerouac's literary project (the Legend of Duluoz in particular), the centrality of Catholicism to Kerouac's more popular works like On The Road become much more apparent both in terms of aesthetics and philosophy. What Visions of Gerard reveals is this construction of the Legend of Duluoz and allows us to see the way in which

Kerouac's vision, one not fully revealed solely in On The Road and countercultural

(mis)interpretations of that work, is in keeping with Kerouac's Catholic orientation and ties his particular literary vision into the pilgrim conception of man preeminent amongst American

Catholics working in the mid twentieth century.

Visions of Gerard

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Visions of Gerard is set in Lowell, Massachusetts during the first years in the life of our narrator and alter-ego of Kerouac himself, Jack Duluoz.13 However, while Jack is the narrating presence that gives voice to what transpires, the central figure of this work is "saintly...[and] pure" (VOG 1) Gerard. From the beginning a bond is formed between Gerard and Jack Duluoz, one so strong that Jack loses his own sense of identity, saying that "for the first four years of his life...[Jack] was Gerard" (VOG 2). As in Kerouac's own life where "Gerard was to become a highly valued item in the family museum [...] held up as a sort of Holy Child of Atocha, canonized, beatified, and stigmatized as the incarnation of good [as] Jack obsessively emulated his anointed brother" (Garcia-Robles 1), it is from Gerard that young Jack Duluoz learns of

Catholic spirituality and the divine. Gerard teaches his brother about "holiness and...tenderness"

(VOG 2) and contrasting with the "beastliness and compromising gluttony and compensating muck" (VOG 15) that makes up most life on this Earth. James T. Jones describes how "[t]he narrator's point is to compare his brother to Markel in The Brothers Karamazov and to Gerard's patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi [...] to set him apart from all the other inhabitants of Lowell, including the writer himself" (37). Young Jack Duluoz draws a clear distinction between Gerard and the rest of humanity, elevating Gerard above the fallen, post-lapsarian world. While Kerouac describes existence for most on Earth is merely "another word for mud" (VOG 15) and something dirty, Gerard exhibits a purity or cleanness that can be tied to the divine and the morals and ethics associated with it. Gerard is not saddled with the dirt and grime of existence that most people are. Kerouac portrays life on earth as having become something beastly and meant for animals, depicting "life in general [as] a compost heap, a prison house of decay"

(Giamo 118), with men reduced to something less than human and falling short of the image God crafted them in. Gerard, however, follows in the tradition of man was made in God's own image

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and thus an example of how humanity should act, a lone light shining amongst the darkness created by the rest of humanity's baser instincts.

Even in those moments when Duluoz recalls his young brother acting in a way that runs contrary to his "pure and tranquil" nature (VOG 1), after "ha[ving] never seen Gerard angry" until seeing him scold a cat for having eaten a mouse and feeling "as one might have felt seeing

Christ in the temple bashing the moneychanger tables" (VOG 11). Jesse Menefee describes, in a discussion of the Dostoyevskian qualities to Kerouac's writing, "[t]he idea of Gerard's perfection repeatedly resurfaces in Kerouac's mind as the pretext for nearly endless self-reproach concerning his own moral failures" (440), with Jack Duluoz pointing to these extremely holy and seemingly unrealistic points of comparison for how he sees Gerard. Duluoz also notes how

"Gerard had birds that neighbor and relative could swear did know him personally" (VOG 19), calling to mind the aforementioned St. Francis of Assisi who famously was the patron saint of all animals and preached a sermon to the birds. Kerouac uses these religious and holy figures (even

Christ himself) as the prism through which he sees Gerard, imbuing him with a goodness and reverence that makes him a paragon of virtue in Jack Duluoz's life. Even the fact that "Gerard was a sinner" and thus needed to receive the Sacrament of Penance (VOG 31) is couched in the idea of him as an example or paragon as "in Kerouac's description, Gerard's confession has little to do with admitting transgressions [...] confession is seen as a verbal manifestation of truth, a hermeneutics of the self that reveals, without embarrassment or dishonesty, the endless movement of thought [...] confession helped to achieve a transcendent form of self-presence"

(Genter 32). Gerard is a model "by subject[ing] himself to the traditional Catholic cycle (sin— repentance—redemption)" (Giamo 118) of that behavior and belief for his younger brother and that he will take with him for the rest of his life.

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What becomes clear, through this contrast Kerouac draws between Gerard and the rest of humanity, is that the young saintly boy is not meant for this world and cannot hope to survive in it for very long. Duluoz notes how Gerard was "sickly...with a rheumatic heart [which] made him ill for the most part of his life" (VOG 1), his body too frail and his heart too weak to keep him alive. Gerard's father bears witness to this as well, noting that "with [Gerard's] sickness inside...[that] there's a gang downtown [that] would" eat him like a cat eats a mouse (VOG 16).

The seemingly sinful and unholy life, typified by the "gang downtown," has the capacity to kill someone as innocent and pure as Gerard and ultimately does. Kerouac describes the rest of humanity "are spiders [who] sting one another" (VOG 31) and it is through those stings to which we subject one another, ones we cannot help but perform through our based and sinful nature, that Gerard is ultimately killed. Most hearts have been hardened by the world and can survive despite the stings of sin that occur. Gerard, because of his saintly and good nature, is not equipped to withstand the ugliness of man and is worn down by those assaults to the point of death.

Duluoz, even from the beginning, understood this about Gerard, as he recalls "running pellmell out of the house [...] gleefully [...] yelling 'Gerard est mort!' (Gerard is dead!) as tho it was some great event that would make a change that would make everything better, which it actually was [...] something to do with some holy transformation that would make him greater and more Gerard like" (VOG 109). Gregory Stephenson describes how in this instance "death is a victory and a reward" (37) and it is this notion that colors Jack's initial reaction and makes it different from that of his mother and father's outward signs of mourning. Jack, both in the moment as well as reflecting as he puts forth these words, sees Gerard's death as a release or a movement into something more or better and thus something not to be mourned or greeted with

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sadness. Gerard was too pure to survive in this world and that getting away from this world would put an end to the suffering of the innocent Gerard and allow him to become the more ideal or perfected person of himself.

It is the death of this innocent creature as a result of humanity's sinful nature and his example provides the impetus for Jack Duluoz to craft his legend, causing those works that make up that Legend (such as On The Road) to bear the imprint and influence of Gerard. Looking back from the vantage point of "1956, Jan. 16" (VOG 121) when he is writing this book, Jack Duluoz realizes that "the whole reason why [he] ever wrote and drew breath...[was] because of Gerard, the idealism, Gerard the religious hero" and that he had to "write in honor of his death" (VOG

112). James T. Jones notes how "Kerouac's creativity is haunted at its very source" (34) and, in turn, this applies to Kerouac's alter-ego Jack Duluoz as well. The specter of Gerard, what he represents, and what led to his death, is the driving force of the Legend of Duluoz. As George

Dardess notes, it is Gerard's "idealism" as "the main exemplar" of Catholicism, "the nearest saint" to Jack and thus a manifestation of "divinity immanent in matter" (93). Gerard is the embodiment, the physical manifestation, of all that is good within the context of the Catholic faith. Duluoz's has become detached from that goodness and "idealism" and he has instead

"grown sick" (VOG 112). "Kerouac portrays the death of his older brother Gerard at age nine as part of his loss of connection to Québec and French-Canadian culture" (Melehy 116), a culture closely linked to the Catholicism of which Gerard was such an exemplar, and with that detachment Duluoz is trapped in the mire of sin along with the rest of humanity. By picking up the "indefensible Usable pencil" (VOG 112), Duluoz is trying to reconnect himself with the goodness and idealism that Gerard represented, imaging that "[Gerard] were here to bless

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[Jack's] pencil" as he "undertake[s] and draw[s] breath to tell his pain-tale for the world that needs his soft and loving like" (VOG 3).

In a way that mirrors Flannery O'Connor and her characters experience of that moment of grace often through a confrontation with violence and mortality, "Kerouac has confronted death, not denied it" through his engagement with the memory of Gerard and what he represented, as

"he has allowed his uncanny memory of Gerard to broaden into visions of near saintliness, brotherly love, familiar unity, the pain of loss, personal and communal grief, and ultimate reality" (Giamo 127). "Duluoz explores his memories of Gerard," Gregory Stephenson writes of

Visions of Gerard, "in order to take a bearing on his own life, to confirm the course that he is following, and to rediscover and reaffirm the original motive power of his journey" (35), closely linking the example of Gerard and the lessons of his life to the narrative Duluoz wants to create.

Through his writing, Jack will portray Gerard as a vanguard of the "Dove" that is "the church," one he would "never malign" as it "gave Gerard a blessed baptism" (VOG 29). Nancy M. Grace, noting in the author's own background, that "[f]rom Kerouac's own admission, he inherited his mother's penchant for the divine, which, when combined with the traumatic experience of the early death of his older brother Gerard who succumbed at age nine to rheumatic fever, endowed him with a visionary perspective on the world" (2) and we can in turn understand a similar perspective existing in Jack Duluoz as well. By writing and telling Gerard's story, Jack can reconnect with Gerard and proclaim those ideals he represented. To do so, Jack must craft his

Legend that corrects or compensates for Gerard's death, one caused by humanity's indifference and outright resistance to Gerard's message of kindness and compassion and that leaves mankind in a state of sin. Because of humanity's sinful nature, there is a need for "a spiritual hero to scoop people out of the bottomless muck of life" (Giamo 118), to re-instill the grace that was lost in the

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sin of not receiving Gerard as they should have. It is in that spirit that Jack Duluoz both metaphorically and more literally performs the act of penance and confession, heading out into a life "on the road" as a wayfarer as well as drawing breath and making the utterance that is the

Legend of Duluoz.

What Visions of Gerard defines is the larger structure for Kerouac's fiction into which all his works, like the more widely read On The Road, fit—the Legend of Duluoz. Understanding that framework and Kerouac's adoption of that form allow for the Catholic orientation and influence in Kerouac's writing to be more fully grasped. In terms of how he conceived of himself as a writer, Kerouac saw himself as a "recording angel" who sought to experience and then transcribe the human experience onto the page as some agent of God and the divine, crafting a narrative with his narrator and authorial stand-in figure taking a "birds eye personal view" of this life that could be portrayed in the "form of a legend" (Selected Letters 1957-1969 9). Clearly,

Kerouac's vision for his fiction and what he aimed to accomplish and convey extended beyond the pages of On The Road as he strove to create this vast narrative that ran its course over an interconnected series of books that would be the Legend of Duluoz. Another space in which

Kerouac explicitly outlines his vision for his Legend is in the prefatory note to his novel Visions of Cody. In it, Kerouac established "the scope of his work" that would become the Legend of

Duluoz. Kerouac's individual books are "just chapters in the whole work which [he] call[s] The

Duluoz Legend14" (VOC preface). Each individual book forms a part of this larger narrative that encompasses the life of its narrator, Jack Duluoz. Kerouac's individual novels should not be viewed as ends to themselves; the end of one individual novel (such as On The Road or Visions of Gerard) is not meant to signify the end of the Legend, just one chapter or phase of it.

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Kerouac was not original in envisioning this structure, finding inspiration in other great literary figures. One such example was the French novelist Marcel Proust, who serves a "literary forebear" for "this experiment" in literature (Jones 107) and Kerouac described in that prefatory note when he said his works would be "like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past except that

[his] remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed" (VOC, preface)15 as Kerouac sought for a "straight continuation" to create "a long shelf of books" filled with

"interlocking novels" (Nicosia 410, 412). Kerouac consciously drew on this form, following the precedent set by writers in his own Legend of Duluoz. Jack Duluoz, this Kerouac-like character in many ways, would be the man whose life is examined, as he witnesses "the world of raging action and folly and also... gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of his eye" (VOC preface).

Kerouac ties the very act of living to the act of writing by aligning himself with these authors who crafted such vast examinations of the life of a man.

But while writers like Proust, who inspired Kerouac, are associated with their narratives that exist beyond the pages of one individual novel, Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz is something more elusive and difficult to establish and subsequently analyze. Kerouac intended for the characters in his narrative to exist throughout all his works and that growth and change in characters could be tracked from novel to novel. "Dean Moriarty becomes Cody Pomeray [and]

Sal Paradise becomes "Jack Duluoz" (VOC preface) over the course of the Legend of Duluoz; we are meant to see these characters as being the same and the narrative continuing beyond one novel. Rather, it was due to "the objections of [his] early publishers" that he could not "use the same personae names in each work" (VOC, preface), though Kerouac wished he "could have used the same names" and that he would "certainly do [that] when somebody consents to issue

[his] collected works" (Selected Letters 1957-1969 444). The inconsistencies regarding the

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names were not by Kerouac's choice; he wanted us to see the characters as being the same from one novel to another.

Though the work of his publishers made the Legend of Duluoz difficult to precisely discern, that Kerouac's books were both composed and published out of order within the

Legend's own chronology also added to the confusion. Kerouac's difficulties in finding a publisher for his experimental prose added to this, leading to an important work like Visions of

Cody not published in full until after Kerouac died. This can be seen in the discrepancies between the composition of Kerouac's texts and the date of their publication. Kerouac began writing On the Road in 1951 but it was not published until 1957, while during that same period

Kerouac expanded and experimented with the story and form of On the Road so much so that it became a separate novel, Visions of Cody. Similarly, Visions of Gerard was composed in 1956, yet it was not published until 1963. It is only retrospectively that we, as readers, can establish the chronology of the Legend of Duluoz. Through the work of biographers and literary critics, we can see and understand what exactly constitutes the Legend of Duluoz. As Ann Charters writes, these books can be "encountered...as separate novels" but can also "be read in the order as the

Legend intended" (Kerouac: A Biography 357). It takes a conscious act by the reader to read the texts in the order required by the Legend. We are looking at something that exists yet also does not exist. We accept and understand Kerouac's intent to fashion "a giant epic" out of his entire life and create "one vast book" (VOC, preface), yet no such "book" was ever created; there is no

Legend of Duluoz available to purchase at the bookstore, nor does Legend of Duluoz precede the title of each individual novel in the same way that Remembrances of Things Past preceded the individual title of each novel in Proust's saga. Because of the discrepancies in publication as well

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as the somewhat obfuscated nature of this legendary structure, one will often look past this element as a means of better understanding Kerouac's writing.

Those critical appraisals of Kerouac that consider this structure and the way in which its presence should affect our interpretations of his fiction fail to foreground Kerouac's Catholicism and its primary role in shaping his literary sensibilities as well as the Legend of Duluoz itself.

Gregory Stephenson writes of how Kerouac's Legend shares qualities with "the archetypal hero- quest" that breaks down into roughly three stages: "separation, initiation and return" (17).16

Gregory Stephenson's analysis, along with those other studies such as Ben Giamo's Kerouac, The

Word and The Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester and James T. Jones's Jack Kerouac's

Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction that focus on the larger narrative scope of Kerouac's fiction, portrays it as a non-denominational "hero-quest" or

"bildungsreise—the narrative of development" (17). These analyses do not fully incorporate

Kerouac's Catholicism into its analysis of the Legend, providing an entry point into this structure but not thinking about the ways in which Kerouac would provide a unique or personalized approach to this form. Kerouac's Legend of Duluoz tells the story of a life that displays the notion of man's condition as a pilgrim and wayfarer, something that is established through the framework of the Legend as defined in Visions of Gerard and that we can see applied in

Kerouac's most famous work, On The Road.

On The Road

On The Road begins the second phase of the Legend of Duluoz, the "initiation" as defined by Stephenson, in which the Jack Duluoz character heads out into the world to begin his penitential "life on the road." It will be this life for Salvatore Paradise17 that will be the act of

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penance and atonement for the of the world that manifested itself in Gerard's death. Hassan

Melehy identifies "a reach to the past" in On The Road, one tied to "the phrase le chemin de la croix, 'the Way of the Cross,' underscoring the spiritual quest that permeates Kerouac's vocation as a writer" (58), identifying that the road Paradise travels is one that leads back to the beatific bliss that Gerard represented and it is a place of penance where one must carry the Cross. The road is not just a place for "joy [and] kicks" (OTR 180) but also where one "has to sweat and curse to make a living" (OTR 2) as shown through the life of Dean Moriarty, who functions as an embodiment of this road life for Paradise as "he actually was born on the road" (OTR 1). Ben

Giamo describes how "[b]oth the road and Dean Moriarty are treated ambiguously by Kerouac.

Together they form the hard surface and romanticized subject for celebration as well as for registering sorrow—especially the sadness bound up with suffering and the feeling of an impending mortality" (23), reflecting how the road should not just be regarded as a place for hedonistic experience and Kerouac as being not just a writer of sensual experience. In the novel,

Dean is the road and his friendship and travels with him allows Sal to perform the penitential act on behalf of the world that it sorely needs to return to a state of grace.

Paradise's outlook at the beginning of On the Road is that of someone forced to live in a world that is devoid of light and joy, reflecting the fallen quality of the world described and established in Visions of Gerard. Paradise describes having "just gotten over a serious illness" as well as a "miserably weary split-up" with his wife and has the "feeling that everything was dead"

(OTR 1). We see our narrator, the central figure of the Legend, in this state of weakness, despair and depression within a world that is lacking in divine grace. The “literal separation from God and heaven” Mary-Beth Brophy identifies as resulting from Gerard’s death in her article on

Kerouac and his connections to the Dark Night of the Soul (420) has continued into this time at

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the beginning of On The Road. This dreariness assaults Paradise on three fronts: in his own physical health, in his romantic life and in his mindset and outlook. A sense of death and desolation abounds; something has left the world Paradise inhabits and that loss has left an indelible mark, extending to his "New York friends" who "were in [a] negative, nightmare position of putting down society" (OTR 8), living in a desolate state that reflects the state of the world after the sin reflected by Gerard's death.

It is into this paradigm that Dean Moriarty enters and shepherds Paradise out into the world to be this pilgrim figure who will perform this penitential act of wayfaring and writing as a way of atoning for sin. Gregory Stephenson identifies how "[f]or Kerouac the condition of weariness, emptiness, exhaustion, defeat, and surrender is antecedent to and causative of a state of blessedness" (23) and that movement away from the defeated to the blessed begins through

Dean's presence and actions. Dean offers Sal a contrast to the "tired bookish" (OTR 8) people in

New York, his arrival of Dean is "a wild yea-saying overburst...[like] the west wind... [and] something new, long prophesied, long a-coming" (OTR 7-8). Dean is the breath of fresh air into the dead way of life that Paradise inhabited and can provide the impetus to begin this act of penance. Regina Weinreich notes how "Dean's relationship to Sal is thus clarified: he represents a loss to Sal, what Sal hopes to realize by admiring only those who burn out like incandescent roman candles" (38), a loss that we might understand as being what was lost through Gerard's death. Dean provides that movement and the sense of the new that will propel Sal out onto the road for the pilgrimage to return to grace, providing him with the experience necessary to create the confession he must make to redeem humanity. Though their friendship is initially predicated on Dean wanted to learn how to write, Sal admits he "learn[ed] from him as much as he probably learned from [Sal]" (OTR 4). As "a young writer [...] want[ing] to take off" (OTR 8), Dean would

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provide the push and the path to have the experiences that Paradise needed to write and, as we shall see, to perform the confessional act. Despite "his mother's warning that he is wasting his time with Dean," Sal allows himself to follow Dean "because he senses that Dean is the messenger of his true fate" (Jones 97).

Dean also functions as a stand-in or representative of Gerard, his presence in Paradise's life even after his death. Paradise refers to Moriarty as "remind[ing] him of some long-lost brother" (OTR 7) and later make plans to go to Italy with Dean, affirming they "would stick together and be buddies till [they] died" (OTR 191). Italy carries particular resonance for

Paradise as he is Italian18. A trip to Italy for Sal Paradise would be a return to an ancestral homeland and including Moriarty in this journey would be to allow him into this familial space and reaffirm the fraternal connections between the two, forming a kind of blood brotherhood between the two. Moriarty even takes on, though in a different form, Gerard's Christ-like qualities or the way in which he represented the holy in the early life of Duluoz. David Simmons describes how "The character of Moriarty embodies the Christlike qualities of charm and personal magnetism drawn from a reading of the biblical Christ as a charismatic healer and exorcist [...] Moriarty can be seen as the starting point for a new 1960s transfiguration of the

Christ figure […] a transmutation that attempts to refresh the prototype by emphasizing the ability that each of us has to be a savior" (117), his connection to this religiosity appearing in the prose with Sal referring to Dean as "the Saint of the lot" (OTR 194) and "the root, the soul of

Beatific" (OTR 195). Sal sees Dean throughout the novel in these mystical and spiritual terms, as a figure that contains something of the divine or that can lead to it, much like (though not in the same way) as Gerard did during his short life. "Dean's intensity is the source of both his transcendence and his tendency to victimize those around him" (Kerouac's Crooked Road 71)

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and while Sal will end up being one of those victimized by Dean, he will also become closer to the transcendent as well. Dean offers Sal the means by which he can atone on behalf of humanity and its rejection of the pure and innocent Gerard. Instead of "Gerard the religious hero" (VOG

112), the world needs a redeeming hero; the world does not need a saint, but someone to take on their sins and make one grand confession before God in the hopes of redemption.

Sal's role as both a redeemer yet also a man of the Earth (as opposed to Gerard's otherworldly saintliness) is acknowledged by Stephenson, who sees On the Road as "a marriage between the pilgrim and the picaro" (21). We might understand this union in the relationship between Sal and Dean in On the Road with Sal serving as the pilgrim while Dean Moriarty functions as the picaro. Those qualities allow Dean to be a man of the world, one who is down to

Earth and can navigate the physical, present world. Tim Hunt notes that Dean is cast by Kerouac

"as a scapegoat figure" (Kerouac's Crooked Road 41) and fulfills that role by taking Sal into the world so that he can experience it to craft his confession, functioning as a part of this penitential act that Kerouac has portrayed in the Legend of Duluoz. The "pilgrim" Stephenson identifies is

Sal Paradise and his restlessness and movement allows him to transform the act of travel into part of the penitential act he will perform. Sal Paradise sees "God in the sky" who "seemed to point a finger at [him] and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven" (OTR 181)19.

The road Paradise is on, both in a literal sense but also meaning this life "on the road" in the more metaphorical sense, is the one that can restore grace and ultimately bring both himself and the rest of humanity to heaven. William Brevda notes how “Kerouac’s heroes are more accurately described as believers driven by a desperate craving for God” (254), one who yearns for the kingdom of heaven” (257) and that apparition Paradise witnessed confirmed that he is pointed in the right direction through this life on the road.

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This vision of God confirms Paradise's status as a pilgrim and gives his travel a penitential quality as it leads to the beatific. Movement itself is given a certain holy quality in

Kerouac's novel, as Paradise notes how the "one and noble function of the time [was to] move"

(OTR 134). Kerouac links the life of the road to the very act of living— "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life" (OTR

212). That Kerouac links living with traveling and movement affirms Kerouac's connections to a conception of man prevalent amongst twentieth century Catholics, particularly those in America.

Just as the institutional Catholic Church sought to navigate between its past and the present world, Kerouac portrayed a life that sought to navigate a similar path that brought the possibility of divine redemption into the real world. The wayfaring conception of man defined by Gabriel

Marcel that is central to Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy’s fiction emerges in this way in

Kerouac’s novel as “[t]raveling, being ‘on the road’, is a perfect metaphor for the author’s liminality— travelers are not at home, nor are they at their destination. They are in a process”

(Amundsen 36). Just as Marcel’s pilgrim must maintain a delicate balance between two poles,

Sal Paradise must exist and move through this in-between state as well. There can be no rest while on this Earth for Sal, for to stop and rest would stop his penance and leave himself and humanity short of the grace they hope to regain. In a "little song" sung by Paradise, we see how he has taken on this restlessness:

Home in Missoula,

Home in Truckee,

Home in Opelousas,

Ain't no home for me.

Home in old Medora,

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Home in Wounded Knee,

Home in Ogallala,

Home I'll never be. (OTR 255)

Sal cannot find a home in any of these towns in America, and thus cannot find a place to rest and cease his momentum. That home, the place where he will (literally) come to rest will be in heaven once he has returned to a state of grace. Like Adam and Eve cast out of (appropriately enough) Paradise, Sal is forced to wander the Earth in this act of penance until he is fit to return to the heavenly place that Gerard occupies, along with the rest of humanity. While the road is a place that contains experience and adventure, it is also a place of penance that fits within

"Kerouac's texts [that] are bestrewn with images of crucifixes and suffering, suffering that looks forward to being redeemed in a better world" (Giles 410). That "Home," that better world, is a place that is lost to Paradise, and only by being repentant, humble and performing the task ordained to him by God can he return to that place. This ordination is also echoed at the end of

On the Road when Paradise is returning from Mexico after Dean has left him to "get on with

[his] life...his wives and woes" (OTR 301-302). When Paradise is "just over the Laredo border" he saw "a tall old man with flowing white hair" and "when he saw [Sal]...he said 'Go moan for man'" (OTR 303), or the same words that God used to call Jack in Visions of Cody. This apparition solidifies his place as this pilgrim on behalf of humanity who will make their confession, and that he is now ready to head out on his own after Dean's abandoning of him. Sal acknowledges this, viewing the encounter with this man as an invitation to "at last go on [his] pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America" (OTR 303). Sal acknowledges and accepts his dual role as pilgrim and confessor, since the imploring to "go moan for man" leads to the consideration of the "pilgrimage." Paradise “is in the field doing participant observation in what

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is in essence a pursuit of meaning, of how to live” (Amundsen 35), gathering up experience that he can articulate in an act of confession. Having these experiences, the Sal who narrates" by the end of the novel "is no longer so naive" (Kerouac's Crooked Road 6) and can take up the confession and make that utterance on man's behalf.

The ending of On the Road affirms both the ongoing narrative of the Legend of Duluoz as well as the nature of Dean's relationship to Sal as one who can introduce him to the world and guide him through it but, ultimately, he must make the pilgrimage and the confession on his own.

Willis Barnstone refers to Sal as “the Dantesque narrator of On the Road, the seeker who will reveal the wonders of his companion, the outrageous saint figure, Dean Moriarty” (251-252) though perhaps another figure in The Divine Comedy might be more appropriate for Dean. Much like how Virgil cannot follow Dante all the way to Paradise, so too must Dean and Sal part so that he can begin the work of the confession, that he can start to really write. As Regina

Weinreich describes, "[w]hat matters instead is that Sal as narrator reaches the goal for which

Dean is a catalyst—the understanding and freedom which comes of telling his tale/celebrating the fact that he is both alive and free" (38-39). Though they will part at the end of this novel,

Dean has provided Sal with what he needed. It is not a rejection of Dean but rather Dean’s reaching the limit of how far he could go with Sal. As Sal Paradise reaches the end of this leg of the journey, he looks back both upon the continent itself as well as his experiences with Dean

Moriarty as he takes a moment to reflect and recall what has transpired. Sal "watch[es] the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense[s] all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it" while also "think[ing] of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found" before concluding "I think of Dean Moriarty" (OTR 307). Sal reflects, having had this experience of

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being "on the road," upon what he has seen and witnessed as he also recalls the person responsible for those experiences (Dean) as well as Dean's missing father (whom Sal refers to as

"the father we never found," again solidifying the fraternal bonds between the two). Paradise has reached the limits of where Dean Moriarty can take him on this penitential journey, allowing him to take this moment to pause before getting to work with the crafting of this confession.

That Kerouac's most famous novel, On The Road, makes travel its central trope is no coincidence and not simply an invitation for post-World War II America to hit the road to enjoy its boom times. When one considers the paradigm into which On The Road fits, namely the narrative of the Legend of Duluoz and the Catholic implications and motivations that Visions of

Gerard reveals, Sal Paradise functions as a pilgrim in that specifically Catholic sense. In On The

Road, Kerouac depicts the character of Sal Paradise one who must navigate between the present and materialistic world while reconciling it with that which goes beyond the solely material, providing what Paul Giles describes as a "reinvention of spiritual concepts in material terms"

(411). Kerouac's pilgrim figure in On The Road, Sal Paradise, reflects mankind's condition as that of the wayfarer or pilgrim, the conception of man that was prevalent amongst the American

Catholics of the mid-twentieth century. "[T]hough by no means [one of the] Catholic writers in any orthodox sense" like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, Kerouac's literary vision

"emerged out of a culture of Catholicism that continued to influence the shape and direction of

[his] work" (Giles 394) and manifested themselves in certain shared qualities with those other

American Catholic writers of the time, qualities not grasped by many readers. By understanding

Kerouac as an essentially Catholic author, it also allows us to more properly understand him as a countercultural author and that these two qualities should not be understood as mutually exclusive.

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Rediscovering the Catholic roots of Kerouac's fiction underscores how problematic his relationship to the counterculture is. Kerouac derided this movement attributed to him as being be taken over by "a lot of hoods, hoodlums, and communists" (Empty Phantoms 332). These agitators would pick up the movement that Kerouac initiated and transformed it into something that many would dub, as Kerouac acknowledges, "the 'Beat Mutiny' [and] the 'Beat

Insurrection'... words [Kerouac] never used, being a Catholic" (Empty Phantoms 332). Part of this difficulty emerges from the fact that Kerouac, cast in this role of the "bloody 'King of the

Beatniks,'" was expected to act like, as he writes in Big Sur, he was still "26 years old and on the road all the time hitch hiking" when in reality he was "almost 40 years old, bored and jaded" (4-

5). Kerouac did not want, nor did he ever seek out, the role of counterculture spokesman that many forced upon him in the wake of On the Road and the heyday of the Beat Generation.

However, that is not to say that Kerouac was not countercultural; it is that Kerouac should not be viewed as a principle avatar for the counterculture movement that persisted into the 1960's in the guise of the "hippies." However, Kerouac can be associated with a movement that went against the grain of mainstream American society and sought to break free of the constraints, namely as a specifically Catholic countercultural figure.

As discussed in the introduction, the Catholic population in America had been isolated and subject to the prejudices of a mainstream society dominated by Protestantism. The difficulties in understanding Catholicism and allowing it to enter the American context was very difficult as "many Protestants in early America were sure Catholicism was antithetical both to genuine Christianity and democracy" (Catholic Counterculture in America xiii).The

Protestantism that founded America and shaped its collective moral outlook did not see

Catholicism as reconcilable to their worldview. What emerged was a difficulty in the

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incorporations of these Catholics, many of whom were part of a wave of immigrants throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, and thus left them on the outside of society as a pre- counterculture. As John Tropman notes, the Protestantism that dominated in American society was "based on valuing work, money, individualism, and self-reliance... support[ing] individual attainment [...] [an] ethic [that] raises explicit and implicit questions about those who are not working... and are 'dependent' on others" (6). The dominant Protestant ethos in America is one that celebrated the man who could be successful and, by contrast, designated those who underachieved as those who were not in God's favor.

By contrast, this class of incoming immigrant Catholics, many of whom were from

Ireland, Italy, Poland and the French provinces of Canada, were bound together by their status as

"social, economic, political and religious outsiders in America... in a society dominated by

Protestant money and power" (Gillis 64). In addition to being socioeconomic outsiders after being excluded by a de facto Protestant ruling class, American Catholics were further alienated as they stood outside the "lenses of individualism and immutability" because of their collective belief that "life in this world is a process, a journey, in which forgiveness is always possible"

(Tropman 99) and "a sharing ethic [...] support[ing] the idea that the human condition, ever beset with problems as it is, will always require help" (Tropman 145). It is this sensitivity towards all creation and a rejection of the harsh individualism manifested in the dominant Protestant ethic to which Kerouac was drawn and is portrayed within the Legend of Duluoz though the extreme gentleness of Gerard, who cries out after a cat just killed and ate a mouse, that "we'll never go to heaven if we go on eating each and destroying each other like that all the time" (VOG 11).

Gerard represents this facet of the Catholic ethos, emphasizing the communal "we" as opposed to understanding and viewing the cat's actions as one of self-preservation and survival. Thus, both

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in Kerouac's life as well as within the Legend of Duluoz, Gerard "was St. Francis of Assisi" to the young Jack, "gifted with an almost supernaturally tender love for all living creatures... [who] exposed the crude insensitivity of men spitting and talking in the corner" and because of this

Jack "pressed closer to his brother, idolizing him" (McNally 5), influencing both the creation of

Kerouac's Beat Generation as well as Jack Duluoz's view within the Legend of Duluoz.

Kerouac's vision of the Beat Generation was informed by this Catholic ethos that ran against mainstream American society, specifically a society that was so enwrapped in a mainline

Protestantism. Kerouac's vision of the Beat Generation was not one of "beatniks... [with] long, dirty hair or parasitic existence" (Morrissette 8) but a reaffirmation of ideas that can be found within the teachings of Catholicism, particularly the Beatitudes. Thus a connection can be established between "Catholic intellectuals" and these Beat writers who came from "the mystical, anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist world" and in the case of Kerouac emerged from "his French-

Canadian Catholic heritage" (Sorrell 193). Kerouac did indeed possess a vision for something that would be a counterculture, that is against the mainstream culture, but not one like what the

Beat Generation evolved into and how it was represented in the media of the time. Kerouac's vision was one that made "the immigrant, peasant consciousness prevalent in Catholic Culture

[...]the essence of faith […] offer[ing] hope that the religion of immigrants might provide the basis for an American catholicity in the radical, original sense of the word" (Catholic

Counterculture in America 247). Kerouac's rebellion was against the Protestant ethos that dominated American life, one that excluded this immigrant culture, seeing a need to shift towards that Catholic mindset that was learned at home (specifically from Gerard) and thus Kerouac aimed to create a fiction that "blend[ed] mystical imagery with materials from the American popular culture" (Catholic Counterculture in America 224). When Paul Giles rightfully notes that

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"[f]or all his bohemian iconoclasm, then, Kerouac preserved in many ways a traditionalist sensibility" (418), he speaks to the way in which this rebellious figure was motivated by something somewhat traditional (Catholicism). Just as O'Connor and Percy were more grounded in the present world and not just retreating into more strictly Catholic belief (as some might contend) so too are Kerouac's explorations and examinations of America driven by a deep spiritual and religious desire.

Through the materials of American culture, Kerouac hoped to impart elements of the

Catholicism into American society. This act takes on two highly Catholic elements. This quality to Kerouac's fiction mirrors the act of transubstantiation, the notion that the bread and wine at mass becomes the body and blood of Jesus Christ, as the Holy Spirit of Catholicism into these

"regular" objects to make them holy. But in addition to this, this quality reaffirms Kerouac's connection to the specific concept of the pilgrim amongst American Catholics at that time that was mirrored in the aims and direction of the Second Vatican Council. Kerouac "was striving for

'beatitude,' the beatific existence of Saints," Armand Morrisette notes, without abandoning the world" (8). Kerouac did not want to abandon America nor the present world, but instead wanted to bring the "beatific existence" to its citizens and redeem them with the abundance of grace and redemption that is offered through Catholicism. Kerouac, much like O'Connor and Percy, tried to find the balance between an infinite religious meaning that exists outside of time and the real and present moment in which one lived, balancing the ethereal with the material. By identifying the role Kerouac's Catholicism played in his fiction and the development of the Beat Generation, we can understand where he fits into a broader American context and better grasp the actual ways in which he functioned as a countercultural figure. Despite being a "native child of American

Catholicism," the author "was ignored or reviled in his own search for grace" (Catholic

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Counterculture in America 206), cast as the "King of the Beats" and progenitor of a "hippie" movement that was anathema to any kind of religious sensibility. However, by understanding

Kerouac's Catholic literary antecedents and influences, his rebellion is less that of the beatnik or hoodlum but rather along the lines of a Thomas Merton or a Dorothy Day20, challenging both the

American sensibility as well as that of most of the western world in the mid-twentieth century that so profoundly conflicted with many of the important tenants of Catholicism.

As we have seen, a lack of proper consideration for Kerouac's Catholicism has oversimplified our understanding of him, making the author appear as a literary James Dean when his works should be read as we do Proust or Faulkner or other major literary figures.

Having "a difficult time persuading critics and readers to regard him as primarily a religious writer" while his "religiosity had often been depicted as a destructive form which finally triumphed over the tolerant, libertarian bohemianism he espoused as spokesman for the beat generation" (Catholic Counterculture in America 206, 224), Kerouac's fiction reflects the important presence of the religion in his literary vision and thus should be treated as one who was "born a Catholic, raised a Catholic and died a Catholic" (Kerouac: A Biography 8). Kerouac created a "literature [that] can best be understood in terms of his ethnoreligious background, which was heavily Franco-Catholic" (Sorrell 190) and thus merits consideration alongside authors like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy as one contributing to the development of an

American Catholic literary mode. Not just playing a role in his background as a piece of biographical information, Kerouac's Catholicism played a large role in the creation of his grand literary project, his Legend of Duluoz, and can be seen throughout his writing, including his most often-read novel On The Road. What one sees when fully considering Kerouac as an American

Catholic author is that his fiction shares the same conception of man's condition as that of the

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pilgrim with O'Connor and Percy, the emphasis placed on the pilgrim condition that resonated with so much of Catholicism in the mid-twentieth century (particularly in America). By fully acknowledging the role Catholicism played in Kerouac's craft, a fuller and more complete reading of his fiction can be realized, one that finds him connecting to authors such as O'Connor and Percy in their engagement with both Catholic ideas and depiction of the concerns of the

American Catholic of that time, and takes the author at his own word as he famously asserted

"I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic."

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CHAPTER 4

MARTIN SCORSESE

"Tonight my baby and me we're gonna ride to the sea and wash these sins off our hands.” Bruce Springsteen, “Racing in the Street”

In late 2016, Martin Scorsese's film Silence was released in theaters, a long-awaited adaptation of Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo's novel of Portuguese Jesuit priests in 17th century Japan. Reception to this complex film with the question of religion at its core was mixed, though critics nonetheless praised Scorsese’s abilities as a filmmaker. Todd McCarthy noted, in a review for the Hollywood Reporter that Scorsese "has flirted with and danced around the subject in many of his other films, most often those featuring transgressive and violent characters" but that Silence is one of the director's "explicitly religious dramas, specifically including Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ." Rand Richards Cooper writing for the Catholic publication

Commonweal, noted how "Silence is a big departure for a director celebrated for chronicles of urban American mayhem" (8). Within the film’s critical reception, there was a sense that Silence was a departure for Scorsese. Ignatiy Vishnevetsky notes this in his review of the film for The

A.V. Club by (somewhat jokingly) describing the film as “the anti-Goodfellas […] Submitting his camera to primeval landscapes, and foregoing his usual Marty’s Favorites playlist in favor of an almost instrument-free ambient soundtrack that qualifies as film music only in a conceptual sense.”

What many critics and appraisers of the film pointed to as that demarcation point was how this film was “the purest exploration of the director’s great Catholic themes […] completely free of New York influences” (Vishnevetsky). This purity or explicit religious nature stemmed from the fact that Silence was about religious figures, while set in a foreign land and a different time.

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Silence is perhaps more obviously concerned with religious faith than his earlier films, but no matter their setting or genre, Scorsese’s films can be viewed as essentially religious films, particularly Catholic ones. From this perspective, Silence is arguably the capstone to Scorsese’s career. His films consistently reveal the profound influence of a Catholic worldview and reflect that in both form and content. Early career films such as 1973’s Mean Streets and 1976’s Taxi

Driver are particularly good examples not only of Scorsese's Catholic aesthetic sensibilities but how his work emerges from, and is in conversation with those ideas prevalent in Catholicism

(especially Catholicism in America) during the mid-twentieth century.

Beyond this more universal Catholic imagination that is seen throughout his filmography,

Scorsese's early and more personal films from the early 1970s are also very much products of their time in regard to what they address and depict as it relates to Scorsese’s Catholic aesthetics.

While Scorsese's "understanding of the major tenets of Catholicism would have been shaped by pre-Vatican II catechism lessons taught to children and adolescents" (Blake 27) and thus he is, like Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, associated with the pre-Vatican II era Catholic

Church, his films of that conciliar period take up the notion of the pilgrim right as the institutional Church itself re-emphasized its condition as the pilgrim church. In an article for

Sight & Sound, Scorsese wonders "How can anyone have faith in the modern world?" He speaks of "the explosion of interest in spirituality in the 1960s. Maybe it was driven by drugs to some extent, but at least it was exploring, questioning - and now that's been completely shut down.

Still, we have to do everything possible to keep asking questions" (Christie 16). Scorsese is concerned with how one has faith and does good in the modern world, concerns that the Second

Vatican Council sought to address for the Church as a whole. Scorsese's relationship with the

Church and with the Catholic identity is very much of that moment of modernization. As Ian

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Christie notes earlier in that Sight & Sound article, "After the promise of reform launched by the council known as Vatican II in the early 1960s, the church has increasingly set its face against modernisation [which] left many Catholics of Scorsese's generation disappointed and angry" but

"Such revelations haven't driven Scorsese to abandon the church but rather to become clearer separating the earthly institution from its role" in human history and existence (Christie 16).

Scorsese both sees the importance of the tradition and the older ways (the church itself) but also realizes the need to live in the present world and thus engage with more modern things (with an acknowledgment of the flaws and imperfections that are part of that tradition). Rather than seeing Catholicism and his own Catholic identity as some kind of trap or constraint one struggles to get rid of, Scorsese understands that religious belief must exist in the present world even if their presence is not immediately clear, harkening back to the past and tradition but a belief that also exists in the present world, never denying the importance of either aspect.

Like Flannery O'Connor and Jack Kerouac, Scorsese was a "cradle Catholic" who was raised in the faith starting at birth. Coming from an Italian American family in New York,

Scorsese exhibited a predilection towards the religious early on in his life, serving as an altar boy at Old St. Patrick's Cathedral in his youth. Owing to "asthma [that] isolated [him] from everybody else" that left him "think[ing] that [he] couldn't do anything physical" (Schickel 6),

Scorsese found himself more comfortable in indoor spaces where his ailment would not affect him. The movie theater and the world of film provided him a safe space from which he could contemplate the world and begin to imagine the possibilities of engaging with that world in film.

So did the the Catholic Church.21 Scorsese describes how "the acceptance I went for was in the

Church" as the young Scorsese "began to take it much more seriously than anybody in the family did" (Occhiogrosso 91). As someone who both was physically different from those around him

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as well as one who took seriously the teachings of the Catholic Church that he saw so often violated or forgotten in the streets around him, the religious space became a sanctuary for him that, in turn, shaped who he would become as an artist.

Scorsese was initially attracted to the theatricality of the mass. He wanted to be part of the spectacle, to live in it. As he became more drawn to the rituals and the life of the Church, his

"first impulse was to go to the priesthood" which "was overwhelming. Especially if you were a kid who couldn't become a member of organized crime" (Schickel 33) as Scorsese was. Part of

Scorsese's attraction to the priesthood came from his experience with one particular clergyman who served at the parish near the Scorsese home. "[T]here was a young parish priest who shaped

Scorsese's life,” Lee Lordeaux notes, called Father Principe who "[b]lessed with a vibrant personality [...] befriended the local boys and talked to them about music, acting, and especially the movies [...] provid[ing] him with his first role model of a man in the arts" (221). Scorsese

"became very enamored” with Father Principe “who was a breath of fresh air" and he found himself "really want[ing] to be like him" and thus "patterned [his] whole life after him"

(Occhiogrosso 99). But beyond wanting to emulate this local priest who was a role model to him,

Scorsese found something alluring in the idea of becoming a priest. As Mary Pat Kelly writes about Scorsese and another famous Catholic artist, "Both [James Joyce and Scorsese] spent their childhoods convinced that they had a vocation. Joyce never made it into the Jesuits, but Scorsese actually entered the New York archdiocesan seminary. He stayed only one year, but [still] intended to join an order of priests after high school" (9).

Scorsese grew up in a world of "the gangsters and the priests" with "[n]othing in between" (Kelly 31). Inevitably, he found himself operating as a mediator, or seer, between two worlds. Despite his early zeal for the priesthood, Scorsese came to understand that he did not, in

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fact, have a true vocation for the priesthood. Becoming a priest "was going to be about cutting

[him]self off from the world" rather than "being a participant in it" (Schickel 56). Filmmaking gave him a path to combine both worlds. Scorsese "wanted to be a cleric" but, in realizing why he thought he wanted to go down that path, came to realize that "the passion [he] had for religion wound up mixed with film" (Kelly 31) as it became something "like a religious vocation"

(Occhiogrosso 92). Though Scorsese would not become a priest and, over time, his Catholicism would become more lapsed and cultural, his devotion to film would come to resemble that of one with a priestly vocation. Scorsese realized he must wrestle with how "to take a religion like that seriously and then hit those streets that are full of lawlessness" (Kelly 31) and how one

"practice[s] these basic, daily Christian—not even specifically Catholic, but Christian—concepts of love and the major commandments? How do you do that in this world [...] liv[ing] amongst the people and chang[ing] life that way or help people reach salvation in the street, through day- to-day contact, meeting by meeting" (Occhiogrosso 92). It was these ideas that would stay with

Scorsese throughout his life and inform the Catholicism present in his films.

Martin Scorsese is very much the example of auteurism, the notion of the director functioning as the primary and authorial force behind his films, one who possesses a distinct aesthetic vision.22This notion of the auteur can be convincingly applied to Scorsese as his films—from Biblical epics to gangster stories to biopics to dark comedies—all share certain aesthetic qualities and thematic concerns. Above all, and perhaps the greatest source of unity across his cinematic oeuvre, is Scorsese's interest in ideas and concepts that are directly related to his Catholic upbringing and worldview. In Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six

American Filmmakers, Richard Blake notes the centrality of Scorsese's Catholicism to his filmmaking and the ways in which it affects his cinematic vision, writing of how "[t]he Catholic

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Imagination of Martin Scorsese [...] penetrates to the very core of his thought and sensibility, shaping the way he perceives the world and the way he re-creates the world in his films” (26-27).

Scorsese’s distinction as an auteur, both in terms of the themes with which he engages as well as the techniques he uses to depict these narratives, is largely derived from his Catholic identity and worldview.

The most notable manifestation of this in Scorsese's filmography is the recurrent presence of "a sacramental view of the world" where "transcendent moments could be reached through material means" (Kelly 10). Scorsese makes it clear that the divine and transcendence is experienced in the present world through physical means, as "the physical entities, either persons, gestures, or objects, can be said to mediate God's activity in the world" (Blake 37). But the presence of the sacramental is not just in these forms, as "Sacramentality appears in

[Scorsese's] films not just in intimate close-ups of holy statues," Lee Lordeaux writes "but also in lively color shots of church festivals; public rituals of community are as sacramental for Scorsese as traditional church icons [...] view[ing] his work as part of a popular religious tradition in which sacramental symbolism is an integral part of everyday life" (228). In his films, Scorsese makes it clear that the divine is to be experienced in the real world where people live and exist.

Scorsese's films also feature narratives about people who, in one way or another, are disconnected or removed from "mainstream" society. The protagonists of his films are outcasts, outsiders, those who do not fit in and do not conform to any notion of normal. Leo Braudy describes how Scorsese's films are particularly interested with "the structure of sainthood" and how his protagonists, who explore these ideas, are "Saint•like in their self-sufficient isolation from the normal world" (217). As Scorsese engages with the notion of sainthood, he clearly recognizes that those who are close to God and the divine will seem a bit strange relative to the

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world around them. Scorsese’s focus on these kinds of characters, ones who are not in step with the rest of the world and look at it from an outsider's point of view, reflects a belief in the pilgrim nature of man. That conception of humanity, one mirrored in the pilgrim nature of the church itself, results in a disassociation from the world itself.

Scorsese's films also contain characters who achieve or strive for redemption that is paid for and achieved through physical suffering. Lee Lourdeaux records how "[t]he nuns" from

Scorsese's home parish "stressed the painful self-sacrifice needed down the long road to Calvary and salvation" (221). The connection between physical acts of suffering and the performing of an act of penance in the spiritual sense is a notion entral to the Catholic faith. Scorsese's "use of blood imagery to mediate the saving power of grace" also reflects this in his films as "the shedding of blood mediates God's redemptive activity in the material universe" (Blake 39). The presence of violence in Scorsese's films reflects an engagement with these religious topics and the existence of a disconnection between God and man. As Vince Passaro writes, the director

"has, of course, been accused of many other aesthetic crimes, most commonly that he celebrates violence [but ] This is like saying that Dante celebrates sin, or that Proust celebrates snobbery" as the director "is not celebrating our condition, he is recognizing it: recognizing what becomes of men separated from God, men who are lost" (48). That this violence exists and is often how we

(for lack of a better term) communicate with one another reflects that we exist in a world that is fallen, that we are disconnected from the source of good.

Martin Scorsese displays a notably and distinctively Catholic aesthetic in the world of film and is one of the major creators of works that engage with religious and spiritual matters in the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition to this, Scorsese's earlier and more personal films—Mean Streets and Taxi Driver—serve as a cinematic counterpoint to the literary works of

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O'Connor, Percy, and Kerouac and reflect pertinent concerns of the American Catholic of that time. These films of Scorsese’s stress the human condition as making one's way in the world between two poles, particularly modernity and a traditional sensibility and morality. Though only one of these films, Mean Streets, would engage with a specifically Catholic milieu, both Mean

Streets and Taxi Driver reflect the existentialism-inflected Catholicism as seen in the work of those authors, in keeping with the emphasis the Catholic Church placed upon its designation as a pilgrim body in the middle years of the twentieth century.

Mean Streets

Discussing Mean Streets, Scorsese defined an essential theme in his work that reflects a sensibility very much of that conciliar moment, saying "How do you lead a good life, a good, moral, ethical life, when everything around you works the absolute opposite way?"

(Occhiogrosso 92). Scorsese's understanding of "the teachings of the New Testament [...] feeling for the other person and giving something to the other person" and displaying "[c]ompassion"

(Schickel 32) led him to create films that engaged with this question of "how to live one's life

[...] How do you practice Christianity living this way and having to survive with these people"

(Occhiogrosso 100) who reject these ideas.

The protagonists of these films by Scorsese—Charlie Cappa and Travis Bickle—reflect this religious belief or spirituality that does not reject the modern world but rather strives to live within in and make one's way through it. While Scorsese was raised in the Catholic Church before the Second Vatican Council and molded by the orientation of that manifestation of the

Catholic Church, his films and the ideas they explore are very much of the moment of the

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Council as they depict individuals trying to make their way through the modern world, striving for authentic interpersonal connections with other people.

Released in 1973, Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese's first feature film and functioned as a thesis statement to the concerns and ideas his films would wrestle with over the course of his directing career. In an interview collected for Peter Occhiogrosso's book Once a Catholic:

Prominent Catholics and Ex-Catholics Reveal the Influence of the Church on Their Lives and

Work, Scorsese describes how "If there's any religious theme or concept in my films, I guess the main one would be the concept in Mean Streets of how to live one's life" (100). This film, centered in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York where Scorsese grew up, is "Disarmingly personal" and "Scorsese's most autobiographical project and a film of uncomfortable sympathies and character identification" (Cronk 26), giving its audience great insight into how Scorsese sees the world and what questions are of greatest interest to him. What Scorsese depicts in Mean

Streets is the navigation that occurs between the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the life one should lead and the life of the streets. That dichotomy Scorsese depicts in

Mean Streets is in keeping with the existential Catholicism that was popular in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in America, and that emphasized the pilgrim condition that mirrors the institutional church's focus on this through the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Though

Charlie, the protagonist of Mean Streets, does not venture far from Little Italy, he is representative of the pilgrim condition on Earth that was so important to Catholicism in the mid- twentieth century. What Mean Streets depicts and examines through Charlie's narrative are the tensions that exist in the life of the American Catholic in the mid-twentieth century, attempting to live fully in the modern world while connecting to those things that exist beyond this world.

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In Mean Streets, these ideas are explored through the film's protagonist—Charlie

Cappa23—who in many ways is the Italian-American and cinematic equivalent to the pilgrim protagonists of Percy and Kerouac. The film's title comes from a line in Raymond Chandler's essay, "The Simple Art of Murder" in which he describes how "down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid" (18). Robert Casillo notes how Scorsese's film has "nothing to do with the detective genre" and that "Chandler's ideal detective hero defines standards met by no one in the film, including Charlie" (182), pointing out how this title choice is not apropos and thus does not reveal anything or speak to what the film is considering. Casillo is correct in noting that Scorsese’s film does not literally feature a private eye like the fiction of Chandler. However, this highly literal and overly contextualized reading of the Chandler selection used for the title prevents one from seeing how it reveals the themes and approach most relevant to Scorsese in this film.

Though not a detective like Chandler's Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett's Sam

Spade, Charlie is that lone man who is out on those "mean streets," trying to navigate them while not being fully a part of them, the one living in the world who is not mean. A primary concern of

Scorsese's work is the struggle to live in the modern world and remain good in the most Catholic of senses. Consequently, Scorsese depicts characters who go out into a world susceptible to sin and surrounded by people who do not live in a good way, as his characters strive to live according to those Christian ideals, to be and remain "neither tarnished nor afraid."

Charlie, like Binx Bolling and Jack Duluoz represents the idea of man as being inherently a pilgrim, walking a tightrope between the different worlds of the past and the modern. In The

Catholic Imagination, Andrew Greeley describes Charlie as "a deeply conflicted young man, caught up in his Uncle [Giovanni's] corruption, swayed by strong sexual desire [...] and yet

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deeply desiring to be a good and even holy Catholic, a modern St. Francis of Assisi" (113).24 The film opens by emphasizing Charlie feeling the need to be out in the world even as he remains connected to the Catholic belief. The film's opening lines emphasize this as over a black screen a disembodied voice (provided by Martin Scorsese) says, "You don't make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it" (Mean

Streets). Scorsese highlights that his "essential focus on religion begins with Charlie's idea of penance in the streets" (Lourdeaux 241) as Charlie fits into the pilgrim construction, in this world but aimed towards something better. The first image of Charlie in the film that follows the voice of Scorsese, waking up in his room in the middle of the night as we see him with "The crucifix around his neck" along with one "upon the wall of his bedroom [that] suggests the

Imitatio Christi with its pacifism, selflessness, and freedom from vanity" (Casillo 187). After he wakes up, Charlie "stares at his reflection for several seconds, as if thinking of the two selves that war within him: Charlie the ambitious mobster and Charlie the Catholic" (Casillo 184).

Scorsese is emphasizing that one does not and cannot exist in one world or the other but rather has to find a kind of balance.

What Scorsese portrays throughout the film is this "test of Charlie's faith" through "his ability to accept Christ's burden, center[ing] on his willingness to love his neighbor" (Keyser 41).

We are formally introduced to Charlie in the film (complete with a caption underneath identifying him as Charlie like all the other major characters have received) while praying in a church. After, we hear Charlie in voice-over saying the following:

I just come out of confession [...] and the priest gives me the usual penance, right? Ten

Hail Marys, ten Our Fathers, ten whatever. Now, you know that next week I'm going to

come back and he's just gonna give me another ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers and...

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you know how I feel about that shit. Those things, they don't mean anything to me.

They're just words. Now that may be ok for the others, but it just doesn't work for me [...]

If I do something wrong I just want to my way, so I do my own penance for my own sins.

(Mean Streets)

In this voice-over, Charlie makes it clear that his redemption is something that must be achieved out in the world. Charlie cannot be saved merely by reciting prayers in a secure space like the church. His penance will be paid through his actions out in the streets themselves. Charlie does not atone through "the simple Irish legalism of reciting prayers for penance" but rather comes through the "Italian-American" mode that "demands a more communal approach to confession"

(Lourdeaux 241) in which expiation of sins is earned through one's actions in the world.25 As

Robert Casillo notes, Charlie's "individualistic religiosity is hardly atypical of Italian Americans

[...] hav[ing] regarded the sacred as present not in church alone but in the world, [...] also view[ing] the home and streets as the testing ground of faith and morality" (183). It is this aspect of Charlie, his displays of this Catholicism manifested amongst Italian-Americans, that also defines him as the pilgrim character in the film. Scorsese described Mean Streets as being "a story of a modern saint, a saint in his own society, but his society happens to be gangsters. It should be interesting to see how a guy does the right thing [...] in that world" (Kelly 71) and by taking his act of penance out into the world (or the streets, more precisely) that makes him into this character that manifests a certain religious ideal.

Charlie grapples with these religious questions and attempts to navigate the "mean streets" while still remaining true to some kind of Catholic ideal as his peers in the neighborhood, specifically local mafiosi Michael and bar owner Tony, who have forgone such associations with a religious sensibility. Both of these men are firmly of the streets, eschewing

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the spiritual and religious notions that Charlie believes in. Michael is introduced as someone coming into stolen goods, whether it be Japanese camera parts or cigarettes, and is decidedly cutthroat when it comes to the debt that Johnny Boy (whom he knows from the neighborhood) owes him. Robert Kolker describes the "disturbing and portentous" quality to the times when

"Charlie [...] talks with the loan shark Michael about Johnny Boy" (203) as it makes it clear that there will be no kind of divine or unearned mercy here on Michael's watch. Between these qualities and his being "snappily dressed," Michael "has higher aspirations within the realm of the criminal underworld" (Rausch 14), which separates him in some way from Charlie.

Tony, who owns the bar where Charlie and his friends spend a great deal of their time, also exhibits a similar disinclination towards the religious beliefs to which Charlie adheres. Tony recounts how he heard a story from a priest that warned against pre-marital sex, one that Charlie heard three years later and took at face value, using it as a way of expressing his skepticism that contrasts with Charlie's sincerely-held beliefs. As Andrew J. Rausch notes, "Tony now sees religion as being nothing more than a business with the priests working as salesman" while

"Charlie says that he is angry, not because the story has done anything to diminish his faith, but because the priest lied to him" (18). Tony asks Charlie "why do you let those guys get to you?" to which Charlie replies "They aren't supposed to be guys" (Mean Streets), a sentiment that reflects "Charlie's idealistic, sometimes naive religious attitudes [which] put him at risk in his tough neighborhood" (Lourdeaux 242). Tony notes how Charlie's "want[s] to be saved" but in reality, to be saved and survive in this neighborhood, "you gotta be like [him]” (Mean Streets).

The religious sensibility of Charlie, one that can be understood as either his Catholic faith and practice or the more merciful elements of his actions, distinguish him from Michael and Tony, who subscribe to a code solely of the streets and the real world.

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The location where these characters interact the most, the bar owned by Tony named

Volpe, reflects the way in which Tony and Michael's world is grounded in the physical world at the expense of all other things. As Roger Ebert describes in his Great Movies review of Mean

Streets, the bar "is always bathed in red, the color of sex, blood, and guilt" (269). Scorsese links these spaces to more earthly concerns through the way he shoots them and the lighting he uses, as the interior shots of Tony's bar are either dark and shadowy or bathed in red light. Peter

Bondanella writes of "the most impressive sequence is the celebrated first entrance into Tony's bar, a location in New York that has been lit in an eerie red light to render it a Dantesque, hellish location (81). Charlie enters into this realm as "Tell Me" by the Rolling Stones plays on the soundtrack. We also see Charlie perform a penitential act in this opening scene. After dancing on-stage with two topless women, Charlie lights a match and holds it to his finger, echoing his description of Hell in his first voice-over that it's "The burn from a lighted match increased a million times" (Mean Streets).

The red lighting of the bar and the orange and yellow of the flame offer both the reminder of physical penance but also eternal punishment. Paul Giles describes how "Analogies between material and spiritual landscapes begin to develop in Charlie's mind: Tony's bar is bathed in a hellish red light; the fire of a cooking hamburger turns into a memento of Satan's eternal grill"

(336). Scorsese turns the materials of this world, whether the objects or the ways in which spaces can be lit and colored, to explore these Catholic ideas of sin and penance. In that regard, Mean

Streets is "balanced between mythic spirit and human flesh" and reflects the Catholic imagination of Scorsese as these elements "function as cinematic equivalents of the Catholic transubstantiation in that they aspire to describe two levels of reality at once" (Giles 349). These

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elements in the film display not just the presence of this divine reality in the present world but also that the divine cannot be separated from the material world and will often move through it.

Charlie's uncle Giovanni is another character of the streets and real world whose code challenges Charlie’s inherent faith. Giovanni is a figure of the mafia's presence in Little Italy, "A tall, distinguished, soberly dressed man who wields his familiar cigar as a symbol of authority

[...] represent[ing] an ideal of the southern Italian male, [with] "the impression of autonomy, authority, and self-sufficiency—a god-like remoteness from the dirty world of ordinary human affairs" (Casillo 190). While most of the characters that populate Scorsese's film are at the lower levels, Giovanni is a more regal and authoritative figure. Telling Charlie that "[h]onorable men go with honorable men" (Mean Streets), Charlie's uncle plays a similar role to that of Aunt Emily with Binx with values derived from an older code and propriety (not to be mistaken for any kind of religious belief).

For Charlie to be good he must maintain those older codes and values, a different kind of stoicism than that seen in the American south but one that nevertheless values the similar honor and sense of superiority in that different space. After Charlie checks in on a struggling restauranteur who runs his business out of a space owned by him, Giovanni "hints at the fact that one day he will own the man's business when he asks Charlie if he likes restaurants. [...] a thinly veiled message to Charlie that he may one day be given the restaurant if he continues to climb the ranks in the criminal hierarchy and do what is instructed of him" (Rausch 17). Giovanni attempts to ground him in the secular world of Little Italy by providing him with this way to make a living, providing him with what some critics have suggested is a Catholic rendering of the American Dream.26 Giovanni uses the restaurant as the means by which to keep Charlie in the neighborhood. It is that promise of something material, a piece of the proverbial pie, that

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Giovanni uses and that Charlie strives for (or believes he must strive for). But even as he is promised this iteration of the American dream, Charlie feels conflicted as "his conscience reminds him that the American dream does not parallel God's plan" (Keyser 44).

The counterpoint to his uncle, his world, and the traditions he upholds, comes in the form of Teresa, and Charlie's relationship with her. With Teresa, we see that notion of intersubjectivity, a relationship that mirrors that between Binx and Kate in The Moviegoer.

Though she lives in the same Little Italy area as Charlie's other friends, Teresa is in many ways separate or apart from that area. She even says to Charlie that she's been looking for a place to live that is outside of Little Italy. "[Charlie's] loyalties and interests are divided, Robert Casillo notes, "among Teresa, his girlfriend, whom he may intend to marry; his peer group of young hoodlums and ne'er-do-wells; and the mob itself" (182). We might understand Teresa in that paradigm as the closest to the religious or Catholic impulse, specifically the kind of intersubjectivity that is essential to that kind of existential Catholicism that seems so prevalent in the mid-twentieth century.

Charlie's struggles with how to interact with Teresa at times reflects this as well. Charlie hesitates to say he loves Teresa and pushes her away at times. When she talks about moving out of the Little Italy neighborhood, he encourages her to leave. Charlie "acknowledg[es] his relationship with her would spell financial as well as familial disaster" (Cronk 26) because of the code that Giovanni embodies as he "cautions Charlie about [Teresa] desires to leave the neighborhood, desires he interprets as a sign of disrespect for her parents" while "Teresa's epilepsy [also] makes her an outcast" (Keyser 43). Charlie's relationship with her, one that is meaningful and not superficial, is one that might cost him the life of honor and comfort that his uncle's criminal connections could provide him. At one point, "Charlie goes to see Teresa to tell

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her that he can't see her anymore, telling her that she and her cousin are making life difficult for him" but in the end "Charlie cannot sever the ties with Teresa, however, and ends up kissing her.

When she tells him that she loves him, he says he doesn't want to say that, implying that he does in fact love her" (Rausch 20). Charlie is not willing to sacrifice this relationship with Teresa, one that features an emotional connection that prevents him from treating her as an object to be cast off when things are impractical or difficult, in order to achieve more worldly success.

In keeping with this idea that reality and its representation in turn also conveys some kind of spiritual dimension, Scorsese depicts spaces in which Charlie moves as representing the worldly and fallen. While the bars, the places of sin, are dark or washed in a red light, the church where we initially encounter Charlie is very clear and bright. This association with the brightness and the "good" continues in Charlie's scenes with Teresa. The scene that first introduces Teresa, in which we see her and Charlie after a romantic rendezvous, is set in a hotel room with a dominant color palate of white, yellow, and orange. Additionally, the sun shines brightly through the window. Another scene features the two of them walking on a beach, again with the sun dominating the scene. Charlie's other encounters with people are awash in red or the location is hazy with smoke, but his time spent with Teresa occurs in a much more pure light. This mirrors the nature of the characters' relationship as "To admit that he cares for [Teresa] would weaken his standing among the gangsters but "in spite of how he feels about Teresa as a possible wife,

[Charlie] has developed a certain intimacy with her that he does not have with his male friends"

(Gardaphé 74). Charlie's relationship with Teresa is one in which he engages with her in a much more pure manner, and thus Scorsese depicts their encounters using different lighting and coloring than those involving the impurity of Charlie's friends of the streets.

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Charlie's relationship with Teresa's cousin Johnny Boy also has similar implications both on his potential going forward as well as for his religious salvation. Charlie has every incentive and reason to disassociate himself from Johnny Boy as "Both Teresa and the uncle repeatedly tell

Charlie that Johnny Boy is a walking time bomb" (Lourdeaux 242). Yet Charlie, who is looking for "a sign, a means of expiation powerful enough to purge his guilt," finds that potential in

"want[ing] to be Johnny Boy's messiah" (Kelly 69). Charlie feels this human connection to

Johnny, caring about him when others might not and when it might negatively affect his career chances and his standing with his uncle Giovanni. Fred Gardaphé argues that "by virtue of his intimacy with Teresa, [Charlie] is able to control himself better and to feel for Johnny Boy" (75); that his connection with Johnny Boy comes from his relationship with Teresa gives it a certain kind of authenticity. Johnny Boy also affords Charlie with the opportunity to live out his desire to "do [his] penance [his] own way" (Mean Streets). In the famous scene, when Johnny Boy enters Tony's bar as "Jumpin' Jack Flash" by the Rolling Stones plays, we hear Charlie's interior voice saying, "Thanks a lot, Lord, thanks a lot for opening my eyes. We talk about penance and you send this through the door. Now we play by your rules, now don't we? Now don't we?"

(Mean Streets). "[S]orrow for one's sins is worked out not in church but in the streets" as "[t]he quest for holiness occurs, and forgiveness is earned, on the mean streets themselves" (Greeley

115); for Charlie, that opportunity will occur through his relationship with Johnny Boy.

What makes this a particularly apropos and challenging penitential act is that Johnny

Boy represents something contrary to Charlie's nature, "continually caught in randomness [...]

Little violences, sporadic shootings" (Kolker 199) and, as Mary Pat Kelly describes him, "happy just to exist" (12). The reason for Johnny Boy's problems, those with which Charlie has to help with, stem from his careless attitude towards money. Johnny Boy's erratic nature defines him,

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particularly when compared to the character of Charlie who "searches with anguish for the spiritual life" (Giles 348) and "is looking for a redemptive, penitential way out of his dilemmas"

(Bliss 68). While the other men living in his world subscribe to some kind of code, whether it be that of the streets of Tony and Michael or the more regal one to which Giovanni adheres, Johnny

Boy is someone who lives a sporadic and impulsive life, one in line with the notion of the aesthetic stage of Kierkegaard with which Percy engaged. Roger Ebert describes how "De Niro plays Johnny almost as a holy fool: a smiling jokster with no sense of time or money and a streak of self-destruction" (270), seemingly forever in the moment and following the impulse or desire that he has at that given time. Because of that, Charlie sees his obligation as helping Johnny Boy to move beyond or away from that aesthetically driven way of life or, as Andrew J. Rausch writes, if Charlie can "take care of Johnny Boy and make him see the light, [he] will be redeemed" (16).

The film's final sequence reflects Charlie's paying his penance in the real world and the sacrifice he makes on behalf of both Johnny Boy and Teresa. After Johnny Boy does not repay

Michael by the predetermined date and insults him when he asks for his money, Charlie takes

Johnny Boy and Teresa out of the Little Italy neighborhood to try and save Johnny Boy from

Michael's retribution. Eventually, Michael finds them as a gunman sitting in the back of

Michael's car (played by Scorsese), shoots at the car being driven by Charlie. Johnny Boy is shot in the neck while Charlie is shot through the hand and, in the resulting chaos, chases the car into a fire hydrant. One of our final images is Charlie in the pose of the penitent, "kneel[ing] in the street, no longer able to ignore the violence and compromises of his own life" (Kelly 70).

Charlie's wounds have come from a gun meant for Johnny Boy and this shedding of blood by

Charlie is the physical sacrifice, the making up for his sins in the streets he thinks of at the

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beginning of the film and the absolution he sought through his relationship with Johnny Boy.

The water from the broken fire hydrant mixing with Charlie's shed blood, this "image of blood

[...] mingled with water" that "remains constant" (Blake 39) in Scorsese's films, carries with it a specifically Catholic connotation as, after his crucifixion, Jesus Christ's side is pierced and blood and water flows out of it. Mean Streets has shown Charlie performing his own imitation of

Christ, taking up those wounds with "Charlie's wound, a shot in the hand, is his 'stigmata,'"

(Keyser 40). Even Charlie's favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, connects to this aspect of Charlie's life as "Not only is St Francis associated with a boundless love of nature, but his stigmata signify extraordinary fidelity in imitating Christ" (Casillo 187). Andrew Greeley identifies "Charlie [as] a kind of Christ figure, sacrificing himself for his friends" (116) and the way in which he is depicted in the film's final frames certainly reinforce that notion as he is one who sheds his blood on behalf of someone else who does not necessarily deserve that sacrifice.

In Mean Streets, Scorsese depicts man's condition as pilgrim through his main character,

Charlie Cappa. What Scorsese makes evident through Charlie's story is that man must make his way through the modern world, striving to be good and holy while "living [...] in a world of deviated transcendence [...] where higher spiritual impulses are replaced by lower" (Casillo 185).

As a narrative of one trying to negotiate the relationship between the tradition of the past and living in the present, Mean Streets is less a film depicting and criticizing the pre-Vatican II

Catholic Church27 and more a work that reflects the moment of the Council and the kind of thinking and approach that led to its convening and the subsequent reforms. In Charlie's narrative, Scorsese depicts that struggle between past and present, the timeless and the modern, that the Church was addressing as well. Though the prominent presence of sin and penance does give the film a touch of the harsher iteration of Catholicism present in America before the

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reforms of the council, Scorsese tells a story more in line with the other authors of the mid- twentieth century who also tried to navigate that split, thus grounding Scorsese in their aesthetic and religious tradition.

Taxi Driver

After Mean Streets and 1974's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Scorsese's next feature film was Taxi Driver, which was released in 1976. The film reunited Scorsese with Robert

DeNiro after his appearance in Mean Streets in 1973 and brought together Scorsese with screenwriter Paul Schrader. Set in New York like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver is a film of a completely different sentiment. Gone are the stories of the Italian-American Catholic world in which Scorsese grew up and the relationships that exist in that world. In Taxi Driver, Scorsese takes us into a New York that more closely resembles an urban inferno rather than an ethnic neighborhood. While Mean Streets includes occasional glimpses of light and humor, darkness and despair dominate Taxi Driver in such a way that it might be hard to conceive of the two coming from the same director. Though they appear different, these films do share certain qualities, as "Mean Streets also anticipated the visual style of Taxi Driver, with its prowling, curious camera sniffing around characters for a better view, the heavy use of an orange filer, and, of course, the integration of city streets and locations as the defining, delimiting contexts in which each film takes place" (Kirshner 129). Beyond any formal connection, what links these films together is a religious sensibility, the existential Catholicism that emphasizes man's condition as a pilgrim. Mike Pizzato writes of how "Both Mean Streets and Taxi Driver show protagonists trying to save others" (128), as it is protagonists who attempt to perform redemptive acts within the modern and fallen world in which they live.

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Scorsese's descriptions of the antecedents for Taxi Driver highlight this quality of its narrative:

I had trouble reading as a kid. My parents didn't have books in the house. But for some

reason, in the late fifties I began to read, and there were three books that really hit me:

The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by

James Joyce, and the key one, Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground [...] those

feelings I took away from reading Notes from [the] Underground were a direction for me

to Taxi Driver. You don't like the person. But in your deepest, darkest, secret self you

realize that's the way you've been thinking as well. It's also from constantly being pushed

aside and rejected [...] It's not the rational way to be, it's not the good way to be, but it is

human. It's part of the human condition. (114-115)

Scorsese points to major works of Catholic literature and existentialism as being influential to his direction of Taxi Driver. Even though it was not as explicitly Catholic as Mean Streets, Taxi

Driver still comes from a place that is, in some essential way, Catholic. Scorsese himself notes this, describing his "own personal reference[s] […] Like the moment when he burns the flowers before he goes out to kill. And when he's buying the guns and the dealer lays them out one at a time on the velvet, like arranging the altar during mass" (Ebert 45). Ebert also noted the Catholic possibilities of some of the aspects of the film, writing about how "sacramental detail" served as

"a motif in Taxi Driver, where overhead shots mirror the priest's-eye-view of the altar" (271). In this way, Scorsese brings a Catholic visual sensibility to Taxi Driver even though the specifics of the story are not explicitly Catholic.

Beyond these images and tropes, the narrative of protagonist Travis Bickle depicts an imperfect person living in a fallen and sinful world and attempting to achieve some kind of

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redemption for himself by saving others, echoing the penitential act that Charlie undertakes in

Mean Streets. While Mean Streets features a depiction of this that calls to mind Percy and

Kerouac's protagonists, Travis Bickle represents this idea taken to an extreme as the grotesqueness of his character, both in his actions and the violent story Scorsese tells, is much more reminiscent of a Flannery O'Connor story as a narrative of "grace in territory held largely by the devil" (MM 118). By depicting the dislocation of man, the need for redemption, and the physical reality of that redemption, Scorsese created a film in Taxi Driver that was in keeping with the Catholic concerns of his other early films as well as those other American Catholic authors of the mid-twentieth century. Scorsese continues the work of O’Connor, Percy, and

Kerouac into the realm of film as he depicts one’s navigation of the modern world and striving to reconcile one’s self within it.

At the very beginning of the film, Travis exhibits traits indicative of his sense of alienation and disconnection. As he applies to work as a taxi driver, Travis tells the personnel officer he "can't sleep nights" and that he "just[s] want to work long hours" (Taxi Driver). Lesley

Stern writes of how Travis is "Possessed by insomnia, by a disturbance of basic body rhythms" and thus "is driven to keep moving, looking, restlessly circling" (50). In that same initial interview as he applies for the job driving a taxi, Travis says the reason he wants the job is because "I ride around nights mostly... subways, buses... I figure, you know, if I'm gonna do that

I might as well get paid for it" (Taxi Driver). Travis is defined by his constant, restless movement and his inability to connect to the world around him, to feel in any way at home in it, a "condition [that] is compounded," Jonathan Kirshner notes, "by his inability to make connections with other people, despite numerous if clumsy efforts on his part to establish them"

(129). Because of his lack of connection, Travis is turned into a peripatetic wanderer. In voice-

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over, Travis says at one point "Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man" (Taxi Driver).

Travis identifies himself as being someone of God, of being connected to the divine in some way even in his loneliness and isolation. Part of this "existential nausea" exists in the character "since

Travis is a Vietnam veteran, perhaps with post traumatic stress syndrome" (Pizzato 129), calling to mind some qualities of the men returning from war in the stories of Hemingway and the sense of dislocation that they experience. Travis is "[a]lienated from his own humanity" and "enclosed in his taxicab," which leaves him "no common purpose with anyone else" (Kelly 88).

Part of Travis' sense of dislocation has to do with the world around him, one that has become an urban inferno or nightmare. Through his camera, Scorsese shapes a waste land that echoes the one depicted by T.S. Eliot, an “Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn” where “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many” (“The Waste Land” 39). Scorsese places

Travis in the midst of this, a New York that mirrors the London of which Eliot wrote, a place of death and decay where life does not exist and there is just “dry sterile thunder without rain”

(“The Waste Land” 47). Scorsese is a director who Jake Horsley describes as "one with the clearest vision of modern civilization as Hell" (145), showing the possibility of evil and sin in the present world or, to put it another way, the "territory held largely by the devil" in which

O'Connor said her stories took place. The world Travis sees around him is "a kind of Dantean inferno feeding on the weaknesses of weak people, turning them into zombies" (Abrams 81) where "steam rises through the darkness" throughout the film "as a suggestion of the private hell that torments Travis" (Blake 35). Scorsese begins the film with a "the front end of a Checker cab emerging from smoke [...] immediately recognizable" as "[t]he streets of New York often have steam pouring from their manhole covers [...] illuminated by headlights" as "Scorsese therefore

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begins with an image familiar to anyone who knows New York. But at the same time he instantly defamiliarizes it, makes it strange" (Kolker 234). Scorsese gives the world around Travis this mysterious, malignant quality by enhancing its strangeness and the darkness within it, taking this everyday image and making it seem strange or peculiar. Scorsese returns to the same use of color and light in Mean Streets to convey the unnatural quality of the world Travis moves through. The same reds that bathed Tony's bar now appear in the neon lights of Times Square and other sections of New York, blinding Travis at times and standing out as one of the few points of illumination in the otherwise dark New York night.

In his journal, where he records all his personal and private thoughts, Travis writes of

"All the animals [that] come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal" and his hope that "someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the street” (Taxi Driver). Travis longs for an act of purification, a cleansing of the city to sweep away all this detritus. Robert Wood alludes to this, describing the film as "the culmination of the obsession with dirt/cleanliness that recurs throughout the history of American cinema" (51) with "Travis becom[ing] obsessed with the mission of washing the scum from the streets—the scum being both literal and human flotsam" (52). Travis' desire for the "real rain" takes on biblical connotations, recalling the flood of Noah from the Old Testament and a kind of biblical justice or retribution to make up for the sin that permeates the rest of the world. It is a powerful, violent act, calling to mind the violent act of grace that O'Connor describes and depicts in her writing. It is that feeling that connects Travis to the protagonist of the Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground as well. "Dostoyevsky's The Underground Man and Scorsese's Travis

Bickle," Andrew J. Swensen writes, "see metropolitan society as an earthly hell in an age of a dying or already dead God (or gods) [...] plac[ing] themselves in an adversarial relationship with

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the world at large, as they pursue the ideals of spiritual reconciliation and self-realization in" as will be addressed later, "ironically repugnant actions" (267-268). What defines Travis, and what makes him fit within the Catholic aesthetics of Scorsese's other films, is that he goes out into the world in search of something good, some kind of authentic connection that connects what can be understood as God or the divine.

However, Travis' failing attempts at human interaction reflect his disconnection as he lacks the experience of intersubjectivity with another person. In that initial interview with the taxi personnel officer, Travis says he "can't sleep nights" to which the officer replies "There's porno theaters for that," followed by Travis saying "Yeah, I know. I tried that" (Taxi Driver).

Travis' turning to porno theaters as a place of refuge and respite reflects a conception of human interaction as being transactional or that he's engaging with people as objects rather than individuals. That Travis is oriented this way at the beginning becomes clear as "we witness

Travis' inability to relate to others as he awkwardly attempts to make conversation with a female concession stand worker" (Rausch 40). Travis' order from the concession stand, specifically the junk food and sweets, reflects this as well as Travis does not regard himself with any worth or value. Throughout the film, much of what we see Travis consuming is very unhealthy, reflecting an irony that this character who "is neurotic about filth, overly anxious about cleanliness, obsessed by various forms of excrescence" (Stern 49) is in reality "a reflection of that degraded environment: popping pills, eating junk food, transcending the rhythms of nature in his night- time wanderings" (Cox 22).

While Travis feels disconnected from the rest of the humanity, he believes he discovers the potential for authentic human connection in the form of Betsy. In his journal, Travis describes first seeing Betsy, a member of Senator Charles Palantine's campaign for president, writing in his

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journal, "She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, she is alone. They... cannot... touch... her" (Taxi Driver). The pauses in between the final four words punctuate each individually, making it clear that Travis views Betsy as someone who has not been pulled down into the morass of modern society. The first image of Betsy entering Palantine headquarters, moving in slow motion with a frenetic and fast moving shot of the streets of New

York just before, makes her into something more than human, an ideal and a representative of purity. Because of how he perceives her, as an angel or something not of this world, Travis does not accept Betsy as a fully realized person, "a self-possessed, if unexceptional, individual, whose stress on pushing Palantine before his policies implies a certain cynicism" (Grist 137) displayed shortly after Travis' introduction of the character. Travis fixates on Betsy as a way of bringing himself out of the hellscape of the world around him. Yet conceiving of Betsy in this way, reducing her to an object that can be used as a means of achieving salvation or transcendence, dooms their nascent friendship. Travis’s decision to take Betsy to a pornographic film in Times

Square for their date is indicative of the fundamental flaw in their interactions. At this date, one borne of Travis’ ignorance as well as his disconnection from the “normal” world, Betsy storms out and screams at Travis “Taking me to a place like this is about as exciting as saying to me

‘Let's fuck’" (Taxi Driver). Whether or not that was Travis’ intention, it reflects that he has not considered Betsy except as an object and not as another subject. Travis has brought her here because, in his status of social isolation and detachment, this is where he spends his time. This causes Betsy to reject Travis and push him away, destroying the image he had of Betsy as he now sees her as “like the others, so cold and distant" (Taxi Driver).

After this rejection, Travis turns to violence, training and conditioning his body and mind to potentially destroy. Travis' writings become more violent and direct, with one entry in his

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journal saying "you fuckers, you screwheads" in his journal to tell them that "here is a man who would not take it anymore [...] here is a man who stood up" (Taxi Driver). Travis shifts from the more passive (waiting for the rain) to active (being one who stands up) as he believes he has found that "sense of someplace to go" he contemplated earlier in the film. Even the image of

Travis training, "stripped to the waist, holds a tightly clenched fist over a flame on his gas stove" shows how he has "replace[d] retributive rain with apocalyptic fire" (Grist 148-149). Things cannot be saved and regrown by a rain of any kind, thus they must be destroyed through fire.

Robert Kolker describes this change in Travis, that "[t]he violence grows out of Travis' mad self and the violent world he sees and absorbs until it becomes his reflection" (246). Travis describes how "Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long [...] There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight" (Taxi Driver) and it is to that task that he sets out to do because of his violent and unhinged reaction to Betsy's rejection. As Lesley Stern writes,

"Travis's attempts to make his body whole, to impose 'total organisation' can be seen as a way of making the body impregnable, untouchable (untouched by the pain of the flame burning), and water (or fluid) tight [...] there can be no softness" (55).

However, even as Travis seeks to close himself off and "tigh[en]" up, his relationship with Iris counteracts this and provides him with an opportunity to experience intersubjectivity and authentic connection in the world. Iris is the underage prostitute who finds herself in Travis' cab one night trying to escape her pimp, Sport. While Travis' interest in Betsy is romantic, his attention towards Iris is paternal.28 Ashley Clark notes how "Bickle undergoes a third-act epiphany" after his assassination attempt on Palantine fails "and decides that his destiny is to rescue preteen prostitute Iris" (50). Travis "attempts to befriend [Iris] but she mistakes

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intentions" (Rausch 43), assuming he is interested in receiving her services as a prostitute.

However, Travis is relating to her in a way that sees her as a fully human individual, a person with dignity rather than as an object to be used for one purpose. Thus Travis' interactions with

Iris and actions on her behalf at the film's close are not "obsession" (Wood 52) or quite as misguided as Lester Keyser's description of "Travis fantasiz[ing] about saving Iris from her life on the streets, envisioning himself as Saint George conquering dragons and freeing virgins" (78).

Rather Travis' desire to save Iris comes from his "see[ing] something impure that he can save, thus transforming her into something virginal" (Rausch 44). Travis does not see Iris as just her impurity, an object of it, but rather as a person who is capable of being redeemed.

The arena in which Travis performs his great act in the hopes of attaining some form of redemption is the brothel, directed at Iris’ pimp, Sport along with the brothel’s other denizens.

Travis’ initial target is the politician Palantine29 but, once those actions are stifled, he undertakes an "attempt to rescue Iris from her world of drugs and teen prostitution, [that] though bloody in its achievement, isn't at all crazy and is, arguably, noble" (Skoble 24). In that final sequence, one that was initially so bloody that Scorsese had to de-saturate the color of the blood to comply with the MPAA, there is "a kind of redemption for another and [Travis] in the violent shedding of blood" (Blake 39) as "like a priest at mass, Scorsese offers the actors' bodies and the stage blood, especially in the final massacre, as incarnating a divine sacrifice onscreen" (Pizzato 132).

Scorsese uses this scene to convey the physical reality of salvation and redemption, in keeping with his Catholic view of the world with its emphasis on the sacramental. Scorsese makes it

“real” for both us as viewers and for characters such as Travis and Iris by depicting this scene in such bloody and physical detail. Travis has "figuratively descend[ed] into an infernal realm in order to save a wayward feminine character [...] expos[ing] evil and attempt[ing] to rescue the

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woman" (Swensen 279), redeeming both Iris as well as himself through this act of extreme violence. For Scorsese, this has to play out in the physical, present world. In that regard, the visceral and physical violence depicted in the film reflects its connections to the ideas of the

Second Vatican Council, showing that good or the moral must exist in the modern world even if it comes in more arresting forms.

The imagery of violence plays a central role in Taxi Driver and in many ways echoes

O'Connor's use of violent imagery to convey the action of grace in stories such as “A Good Man

Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People,” amongst others. In discussing the violence of the film, one that nearly necessitated an X rating before edits allowed it to be rated R, Scorsese said

"When I made it, I didn't intend to have the audience react with that feeling, 'Yes, let's do it! Let's go out and kill! The idea was to create a violent catharsis" (Sotinel 33). Much like how O'Connor used violence in her stories to convey the immediate and real action of grace, Scorsese's use of violence and the violent narrative is to convey something to the audience, "partak[ing] in the sacrificial edification of [Travis'] body and blood onscreen by incarnating the violence in real life, purging the evil from oneself by projecting it on others, then punishing them as villains, while saving or avenging innocent victims" (Pizzato 132). It is this quality of Taxi Driver that

Paul Giles alludes to when he writes of how "Scorsese's films, balanced between mythic spirit and human flesh, function as cinematic equivalents of the Catholic transubstantiation in that they aspire to describe two levels of reality at once" (349). In particular, it is Scorsese's use of this earthly, physical thing—in this case, the violence of the narrative and the depiction of violence on the screen—as the means to explain or convey these larger religious ideas.

However, O’Connor’s depiction of the action of grace through violence differs from that of Scorsese in Taxi Driver as the impetus for Travis and what drives him towards that violent act

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of grace and redemption does not begin from a “good” place. As the film’s epilogue depicts,

Travis is celebrated for his vigilante attack on Sport the pimp along with other lawbreakers, but there is no mention of the fact that he initially was planning to assassinate Charles Palantine, the senator and presidential candidate for whom Betsy worked30. Travis is made into a hero and a redeemed figure by the distortions of the outside world31. The agent that imparts this grace, that corrects the failings of the world itself, is highly flawed and might have directed this impulse where it would have done great harm. Scorsese addresses this, saying "Travis really has the best of intentions; he believes he's doing right, just like St. Paul. He wants to clean up life, clean up the mind, clean up the soul. He is very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual […]

The key to the picture is the idea of being brave enough to admit having these feelings, and then act them out" (Scorsese 62). Travis has taken this impulse to change things to its most extreme end, drawing on the dueling Hollywood archetypes of "the gunfighter-hero whose traditional function has always been to clean up the town [and] the psychopath-monster produced by an indefensible society" (Wood 53). Because we have more access to the mind and character of

Travis than we did with The Misfit or Manley Pointer in the fiction of O’Connor, we do not grasp their drives or motivations as we do with Travis. In that regard, Travis functions as a character of both the violent world of O’Connor but also the wayfarer protagonists of Percy and

Kerouac.

One of the analogues for Taxi Driver, along with Notes from the Underground and The

Searchers, is Bresson's film Pickpocket.32 In that film, the French Catholic director has Michel, his protagonist, see “his life as a petty criminal […] as a circuitous and predetermined "path" toward both earthly and heavenly love […] drawing upon Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment for both broad plot outline and biblical resonance” while still “showing the suffering to others

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that Michel has caused along the way” (Vaux 523). Travis and his acts of violence are somewhat like this, though obviously taken to a higher level given the grave nature of Travis’ actions.

Travis’ violent vengeance causes suffering—obviously to those on whom he inflicts it, but also himself, as well as psychological suffering put upon Iris who witnesses it—but these actions lead him to a kind of love or redemption. Pickpocket’s final shot, in which Michel receives some form of grace as Jeanne grips his hands through the prison bars, foreshadows Travis at the end of Taxi

Driver. He has received praise for his actions in rescuing Iris and perhaps some modicum of peace with Betsy, giving her a ride in his taxi and not charging her for it. "Travis Bickle," Mary

Pat Kelly notes, "thinks that if he sweeps away the garbage, he will be cleansed" (12) as that action, no matter how grotesque or wrong it might seem, conveys the importance of that act of penance, and of cleaning. Robert Kolker points out how "Some writers have wanted to see in the film a study of Travis Bickle as a lost and insular but coherent and self contained individual, in the manner of a Robert Bresson character who achieves a spiritual grace by the almost negative persistence of his activities" (231) as a way of challenging that interpretation of the character.

But "[t]he films that are cited as directly influencing Taxi Driver the most [...] can likewise be read as films about the central hero's redemption and transcendence" even though "Taxi Driver is certainly a more difficult film to read in this manner because its central character is so obviously unstable" (Raymond 73).

But if one considers Travis in the context of Bresson and Flannery O'Connor, a reading of his character becomes much easier and thus ties him to Scorsese's specifically Catholic aesthetics. Even the use of violence both by Travis but, more importantly, in the film itself, makes sense if we consider the film an O'Connor-esque consideration of the modern world.

Scorsese's "use of violent imagery," David John Graham describes, "is not merely violence

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without meaning" (91). It means to shock, but not merely for the sake of shocking but to draw attention to those ideas that Scorsese wished to explore. Graham also correctly notes that "There is also an act of violence at the heart of the Christian faith" as "Its primary symbol, the cross, is a very violent one, no matter how often it is dressed up and softened in church architecture" (88), which also makes Scorsese's manifestation of his Catholic ideas through a violent narrative very appropriate.

Father Principe, Scorsese's parish priest when he was growing up and the one who had the greatest influence on his life, offered up this assessment of Scorsese's film:

Marty's movies do have an Easter dimension. I remember in Taxi Driver, the young

prostitute is saved, and she goes home [...] Marty showed Jesus dying not because he was

a zealot or political agitator, but because of the horror of sin. He sees the perversity of

human vice that causes death and destruction, especially the death of the just man. But in

the film there is the Resurrection. For me, Marty is communicating the Christian

message. His is a kind of vocation and a priesthood in and of itself. (Kelly 243)

Though it is a film that features a great deal of violence and can be misinterpreted to glory in the visual manifestation of violence, Taxi Driver is chiefly concerned with the idea of redemption and resurrection. "Travis's act of mercy, his rescue of the young prostitute Iris," one that is admittedly violent and comes from a place of anger that could have been directed elsewhere in much more destructive ways, "purchases him a miracle of sorts: that he comes to be regarded as a hero for his violent assault on Iris's tormentors" (Palmer 245). Again, the inspiration and influence of Dostoyevsky helps in this understanding. Jake Horsley writes "Dostoyevsky, like

Scorsese, was a deeply religious artist with a genuinely apocalyptic vision of suffering. He saw the criminal mind as having a twisted relationship—or affinity—with that of the saint, and used

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madness as his subject because for him it was the most fertile ground in which to develop his ideas about humanity" (151). O'Connor is another author working in a similar fashion. Much like how the agents of change, the violent actions of The Misfit and Manley Pointer, do not represent good and yet display the power and actions of God, Travis' actions also go about conveying the power of the change of grace even if the character and his motivations are not the same. Thus the film's ending, which shows Travis being hailed in the press as a heroic figure, should not be treated as an example of how "everyone has flown over the cuckoo's nest, and the inmates are running the asylum" (Keyser 81) or that because Travis "has achieved through his actions some kind of personal grace or existential self-definition" thus "civilization is demonstrably unredeemable" (Wood 54). What actually happens is that Travis, "the deranged hero redeems himself, since he has at last found something worth living, or dying, for" (Blake 39) in the form of his connection with Iris. Though Travis himself is "deranged" or "unstable" and the manifestation of it is shockingly violent, Scorsese depicts something miraculous and wondrous through these flawed aspects of the physical world, something very Catholic since "Matter is mysterious. Under the right circumstances it can even become the body of Christ" (Kelly 13).

Though it feels far away from the Italian-American locales of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver displays certain qualities that connect it to his earlier film, particularly in ways that share a certain Catholic worldview. Scorsese's Travis Bickle, perennial outsider and self-professed

"God's lonely man," is adrift and lost in the world but looking for some kind of meaning or transcendence. Where Taxi Driver differs from Mean Streets is in its protagonist and his actions.

Charlie is a low-level member of the mafia with a tendency for self-flagellation and extreme guilt, contrasting with Travis Bickle, who provides "redemption [...] from a most unlikely, ungodly savior" (Blake 17). Yet Travis' "urge to purify his world of corruption is, eventually,

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directed toward the more manageable and particular double task of ridding the city of men running a downtown brothel while rescuing the innocent and vulnerable girl they have victimized" (Palmer 234), an urge that brings him closer to Charlie, who hopes that by saving

Johnny Boy he too can save himself.

Though Travis' initial impulse is towards something harmful or destructive, eventually that desire towards a kind of racial action is transformed as "Scorsese, as cinematic priest, offers the spectacular violence of a romantic outcast, Travis Bickle, finding his vocation as suicidal assassin" (Pizzato 127). Scorsese presents the narrative of Travis not so much to depict one's life and how they are to live but rather to explore the ideas and themes that are at the heart of life itself. Just as Flannery O'Connor did not convey themes by saying one is like The Misfit or

Manley Pointer, Scorsese uses Travis as a way of exploring questions of how one lives in the world and what they should value.

In his multi-decade career with films in all different genres, a certain spine runs through the work of Martin Scorsese as his films, no matter their genre or story, deal with highly Catholic themes and ideas. As the priest at his home parish when he was a child said, Scorsese "was incarnational in his approach to religion; he was able to find God in things" (Kelly 32) and thus all his films contain a certain element of the divine. Vince Passaro writes of how "If one could have raised the dead and positioned [Scorsese] amid his true directorial cohort, Scorsese's companions on the stage would have been John Cassavetes, John Ford, and Akira Kurosawa. All three possessed what the presenters at the Oscars never had (Lucas and Spielberg) or long ago relinquished (Coppola): a deep understanding of the tragic, an embrace of it as the highest form of narrative art" (48). But perhaps even more than these directors, Scorsese's company is with with the great American Catholic authors and artists of the twentieth century—Flannery

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O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Jack Kerouac—given how his films, like their writing, engage with

Catholic themes and ideas in ways that are decidedly Catholic as well.

In his earlier work, which is his more autobiographical and personal, Scorsese also connects with those authors with how he conceives of man's essential condition. "Scorsese's protagonists, as Travis Bickle so accurately says of himself, are, indeed, God's lonely men, and this is a condition of internal exile that they, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fitfully, struggle to transcend" (Palmer 233), as the central characters of films like Mean Streets and Taxi

Driver are on "the road to salvation [that] is indeed rocky for Scorsese's morally sensitive, self- sacrificing, and deeply confused young men" (Lordeaux 228). But it is that quality of "exile" and being on "the road to salvation" that defines both these characters, no matter how grotesque or problematic they might seem. These early films of Scorsese depict, in different ways, the notion of one's condition being that of the pilgrim, constantly in transit or making their way. In that regard, Scorsese's conception of things and the ways in which his Catholic underpinnings manifest themselves are in a way that is in keeping with the tenor of the era of the Second

Vatican Council.

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EPILOGUE

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN

“By Our Lady of the Roses, we lived in the shadow of the elms. I remember ma dragging me and my sister up the street to the church whenever she heard those wedding bells.” Bruce Springsteen, “Walk Like a Man”

This prolonged consideration of man’s condition as pilgrim—making his way through the modern world, striving for authentic connection as a way of experiencing the divine while not belonging too much to this world or the world beyond—did not end with the early films of

Martin Scorsese. To be certain, Scorsese’s films as well as the later novels of Walker Percy continued to engage with and examine this idea even as things moved away from that moment of the Second Vatican Council. However, these ideas persisted in the American Catholic literary and cultural discourse primarily through popular music, specifically the music produced by

Bruce Springsteen during his most creative period (the mid-to-late 1970s into the 1980s).

Springsteen synthesized many of the important characteristics of these four American

Catholics of the mid-twentieth century in his music, as each had an influence upon him and his craft. The singer has frequently spoken of Flannery O’Connor’s influence upon him, particularly on his album Nebraska in which the stark sound of the acoustic songs and the menacing scenes and characters that populate it share the Southern gothic quality of O’Connor’s short stories. The title song of that album closes with a line that calls to mind O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to

Find”: “Well, sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world” (“Nebraska”). Springsteen had

O’Connor on his mind when he composed this album of songs that featured killers and criminals like “Atlantic City” and “Johnny 99,” recorded through a low-fidelity tape recorder and featuring just an acoustic guitar. The darkness of the sound of the songs and the narratives about someone who “got a gun, shot a night clerk, now they call him Johnny 99” (“Johnny 99”) or people who

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have “debts that no honest man can pay” (“Atlantic City”) mirror the monstrous and grotesque characters about which O’Connor’s wrote.

Walker Percy also influenced Springsteen, a feeling that was reciprocated as Percy himself wrote Springsteen a letter shortly before his death as he enjoyed the musician’s songs and noted the connection between him and O’Connor. Beyond this mutual admiration, the influence of Percy shows in Springsteen through the striving for authentic connection with another person in a world that is seemingly resistant. One need not look further than the first song on 1980’s The River, “The Ties That Bind,” to find this idea on display. On that song,

Springsteen sings of someone who “want[s] nothing, don’t need no one by your side” and turns to “[c]heap romance” that is “all just a crutch,” refuting that connection to another by remaining alone or turning to unsubstantial relationships and sex as a means of dealing with heartache

(“The Ties That Bind”). Springsteen counters that image with “the ties that bind” and “a long dark highway and a thin white line, connecting baby your heart to mine” (“The Ties That Bind”).

Elsewhere on The River, Springsteen makes use of the imagery of hearts and the connections between them, singing “if you think your heart is stone and that you're rough enough to whip this world alone. Alone buddy there ain't no peace of mind. That's why I'll keep searching till I find my special one” (“Two Hearts”). Springsteen speaks to the desire for authentic and real connection as being a way of becoming closer to the divine, calling to mind the idea of intersubjectivity that Percy depicted in The Moviegoer. One cannot remain isolated and cut off from the world and those who inhabit it.

The connection between Springsteen and someone who wrote a book called On The Road is one that is very direct, something that the singer addresses in his autobiography Born to Run when he writes of trying to possess some “Kerouac On The Road cool” while driving across the

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country with friends (302). In addition to giving the automobile and the road a place of prominence in their work, both Springsteen and Kerouac saw this space as one of penance as well as redemption, as he sings on “Thunder Road”: “All the redemption I can offer girl is beneath this dirty hood.” The road and the automobile, for Springsteen as it is for Kerouac, represents the means for transcendence, as “[w]ith your faith in your machine off you scream into the night” (“Night”). Even a line like “Make crosses of your lovers, throw roses in the rain”

(“Thunder Road”) draws upon Catholic iconography while also depicting the actions of one’s life as penitential, something seen in Kerouac’s writing. Though Springsteen’s roads are generally in urban locations (like Scorsese), he also points towards the wide-open spaces of

America about which Kerouac wrote. Whether the “Badlands” or “a rattlesnake speedway in the

Utah desert” near “the Waynesboro county line” (“The Promised Land”), Springsteen’s songs often take place in settings that seem nearly copied from a Kerouac novel.

Despite their lacking any Springsteen songs on their soundtracks, the films of Martin

Scorsese certainly bear an influence over Springsteen’s craft. Both men share an ethnic heritage

(Scorsese being full-blooded Italian-American while the maternal side of Springsteen’s family was Italian-American) as well a geographic location (Springsteen’s Freehold, New Jersey was not all that far from the streets of Little Italy in New York where Scorsese was from).

Springsteen’s songs are also frequently set in places that seem to be out of one of Scorsese’s films, “meet[ing] ‘neath that giant Exxon sign that brings this fair city light” (“Jungleland”).

Scorsese’s influence manifests itself greatly on Springsteen’s album Darkness on the Edge of

Town, one that was composed after frequent viewings of Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi

Driver (Pingue). This album reflects much of the toughness and grittiness that Scorsese brought to his films that showed the movements and workings of grace amongst the city streets of New

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York. On Darkness on the Edge of Town, Springsteen sings of characters “working real hard, trying to get my hands clean” (“Prove It All Night”) or “racing” and that “Tonight I'll be on that hill cause I can't stop, I'll be on that hill with everything I got. Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost, I'll be there on time and I'll pay the cost” (“Darkness on the Edge of Town”). This album features characters out on the same “mean streets” Scorsese made famous, trying to find some kind of salvation and meaning.

But beyond these points of influence as well as the connections between his lyrics and the most dominant aspects of each writer, Springsteen’s work and lyrics reflect a similar sensibility to that of those other luminaries of mid-twentieth century American Catholic literature and culture. Like all four of them, Springsteen sees the human subject as someone on his way, in between, moving through this world with an eye towards the next and the divine. In perhaps his most famous song, “Born to Run,” Springsteen articulates a great distillation of this notion of the pilgrim condition very much in keeping with that of the mid-twentieth century, singing “Will you walk with me out on a wire? ‘Cause baby I’m just a scared and lonely rider” (“Born to

Run”). Springsteen’s songs generally focus on someone who is trying to make their way in the world in order to reach something that is good or transcends the everyday. This comes up in another lyric from “Born to Run” when Springsteen sings, “Someday girl, I don’t know when, we’re going to get to that place where we really want to go and we’ll walk in the sun. But till then, tramps like us, baby we were born to run” (“Born to Run”) Springsteen tells the listener about the life of the pilgrim, on their way to that communion with the divine and good. Being

“born to run” and out in the world itself is the only way to get to that place. Much like those authors and auteurs that came before him, Springsteen does not deny the importance and experience of the present world. On “Badlands,” from Darkness on the Edge of Town, he sings

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“it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive” (“Badlands”). And yet, though he values those experiences of the world itself and does not deny their importance, there is the promise of something more just beyond. On that same album, Springsteen sings “I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man, and I believe in a promised land” (“The Promised Land”). That something beyond is something divine, but it cannot be experienced nor reached if one does not make their way and exist in the real world.

These ideas and themes, which recur throughout the greatest stretch of Springsteen’s career (from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s), also stands as the culmination of this movement of American Catholics authors and auteurs in the mid-twentieth century. These four artists reflected the actions of Second Vatican Council as they emphasized the wayfaring and pilgrim condition of man and made it the central concern of their art. Springsteen and his works function as the synthesis of these four major American Catholic voices of the middle years of the twentieth century, bringing together those things that made them so representative of that moment for midcentury American Catholics. The afterlife of those ideas explored in literature by

O’Connor, Percy, and Kerouac was felt first in film with Scorsese and then later in music with

Springsteen. These notions of the pilgrim condition have been transformed into liturgies or sorts, ceremonies to be observed and to participate in like the Mass in a Catholic Church. While writers such as Andre Dubus and Ron Hansen would create an American Catholic literature that reflected the era that came after the Second Vatican Council, during which American Catholics have better reconciled themselves to the present world, Springsteen provided volume for these

Vatican II-era ideas. By bringing together the ideas of these four American Catholic artists,

Bruce Springsteen amplified the ideas they explored and caused them to ring out, ringing in the ears of his audience even today.

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ENDNOTES 1 Massa goes on to describe these specific qualities as being "the concrete political processes of democracy, the materialistic protocols of capitalism and its particular work ethic, the social traditions of public education" (7). 2 See Fraser, The Modern Catholic Novel in Europe. 3 Elie notes the competing groups, such as “the Jewish novelists; the Beat poets; the ‘confessional’ poets, led by Robert Lowell” (xii), groups that would include authors who are a part of this new Catholic literary aesthetic (particularly Jack Kerouac, the novelist most closely associated with those “Beat poets”). 4 See Greeley, The Catholic Imagination. 5 See Giamo, Kerouac, The Word, and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester, Jones, Jack Kerouac’s Duluoz Legend: The Mythic Form of an Autobiographical Fiction, and Gregory Stephenson’s chapter “Circular Journey: Jack Kerouac's Duluoz Legend” in Daybreak Boys: Essays on the Literature of the Beat Generation 6 Edmundson specifically notes the following as elements of that specific kind of conservative thought: “a superficial reliance on statistics at the expense of rigorous moral discourse; a zeal for social improvement that may relieve the reformer of the obligation for personal virtue; the prevalence of ‘ideology’ at the expense of principled practical wisdom; and the deterioration of traditional theology into a new kind of humanitarian religion in which the reformer seeks to fill his own spiritual emptiness with a kind of ‘do-goodism,’ anointing himself priest over his self- fashioned spirituality” (253) 7 In a way, what the grandmother believes in mirrors the “ethical” stage of Kierkegaard’s journey. Kierkegaard describes that stage of one’s life in Either/Or, writing "The Either/Or I erected between living esthetically and living ethically is not an unqualified dilemma, because it actually is a matter of only one choice. Through this choice, I actually choose between good and evil, but I choose the good, I choose eo ipso the choice between good and evil. The original choice is forever present in every succeeding choice" (219). There is a notion of an ethical choice being made, but it is not an ethos that arises from a relationship with the religious or divine (what, for Kierkegaard, would be the God of Christianity). This stage is one that is also seen in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer in the form of Aunt Emily, linking it to stoicism and stoic philosophy. 8 Calling to mind another concept articulated by Marcel—intersubjectivity, in which the “I” perceives the other as a “Thou” rather than as an object or in an instrumental way. 9. The importance that Kierkegaard plays in the study of Percy and his writing can been seen through David Crowe, in an article for Christianity and Literature, arguing that "The Moviegoer is not an unambiguously Catholic novel based upon select ideas from Kierkegaard's schema, but, more than the criticism has shown, a powerful and crafty evocation of that schema, entire and coherent" (190). It can be argued, as seen in this article, that a major influence on Percy and his philosophy still has not been as fully considered as it could, reflecting just how much there can be said about Kierkegaard and his relationship to Percy. 10. In her book on Percy and intersubjectivity, Mary Howland describes the concept as something "between Kierkegaardian subjectivity and Hegelian objectivity [...] which allows persons perceived as an 'I' and 'thou' to share and affirm the world" (3) while Paul Giles defines the term as being “the faculty of apprehending oneself in terms of interaction with others rather than as an isolated individual […] indicat[ing] a preference for concrete social relations rather

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than solipsism” (370). The concept of intersubjectivity in Marcel's philosophy and its presence in Percy's fiction is explored in greater detail in Howland's book The Gift of the Other: Gabriel Marcel's Concept of Intersubjectivity in Walker Percy's Novels and Preston Browning's article "Walker Percy and Gabriel Marcel: The Dialectical Self in The Moviegoer." 11. Percy described himself in an interview as someone more connected to authors in the European tradition, "read[ing] Russian novels primarily and then the French. More so than the American novelists" and "always was closer to Frenchmen like Sartre or Camus or Marcel" (Conversations 31). 12. This can be seen in the numerous biographies published on Kerouac in addition to the ones from which I draw. 13. Jack Duluoz was intended, in Kerouac's conception, to be the same character as Sal Paradise. This will be addressed in greater detail in the discussion of the Legend of Duluoz structure. 14 In the critical discussion focusing on Kerouac and his works, Legend of Duluoz and Duluoz Legend are used interchangeably. 15. In a letter, Kerouac described himself as a "running Proust" who works will "cover all the years of [his] life...on the run" (Selected Letters 1940-1956). 16. For the ideas that Stephenson modeled his hero's quest interpretation around, see Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books, 1949. 17. In On The Road, the Jack Duluoz character is named Sal Paradise and thus, in the section focusing solely on On The Road, I will be referring to him as such. 18. Though, throughout the Legend of Duluoz the Jack Duluoz character is portrayed as of French extraction and in keeping with Kerouac's own ethnic heritage. However, it is worth noting that both countries are traditionally Catholic. 19. This scene appears in Visions of Cody in the following form: "At the junction of the state line of Colorado, its arid western one, and the state line of poor Utah I saw in the clouds huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall the great image of God with forefinger pointed straight at me through halos and rolls and gold folds that were like the existence of the gleaming spear in His right hand, and sayeth, Go thou across the ground; go moan for man; go moan, go groan, go groan alone go roll your bones, alone; go thou and be little beneath my sight; go thou, and be minute and as seed in the pod, but the pod the pit, world a Pod, universe a Pit; go thou, go though, die hence; and of Cody report you well and truly" (295). Its appearance in Visions of Cody links it much more closely with the command to "go moan for man" that occurs later in On The Road. 20. In The Catholic Counterculture in America, Fisher places Merton and Kerouac together. 21. Scorsese would describe, "I'd go in the church, and I became fascinated by the rituals of the mass [...] inside that cathedral—the sense of peace. It was quite, quite amazing" (Schickel 5) 22. The construct of the auteur has been discussed by film critics such as André Bazin, Francois Truffaut, and Andrew Sarris. 23. Cappa is the maiden name of Martin Scorsese's mother (who appears in Mean Streets) as a nod to the ways in which the character of Charlie reflects the thoughts and beliefs of Martin Scorsese himself. 24. Greeley notes that Charlie's reverence for St. Francis of Assisi reveals this quality to him, saying "Charlie is an authentically devout Italian male. Rarely do Irish youths go around hoping to be St. Francis" (113). 25. Scorsese had experience with both of these approaches, being raised in an Italian-American family and neighborhood while attending a parish largely staffed by clergy of Irish descent. 193

26 Paul Giles describes "Mean Streets [as] an oblique Catholic reworking of the American Dream" (339). 27 Roger Ebert describes how "For Catholics raised before Vatican II" Mean Streets might have "a resonance that it may lack for other audiences" (268). 28 As Robert Kolker notes, "In his dealings with Iris, [Travis] becomes nothing less than a parody of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards in Ford's The Searchers" (242), which reflects that familiar connection or concern for Iris. 29 "Regardless of what he thought he might accomplish by assassinating Palantine," Aeon Skoble writes, "when he realizes that won't work, he sets his sights more microcosmically: rescuing Iris" (26). 30 “Travis is celebrated for his violence against a street pimp and other criminals," Mark Pizatto writes "[b]ut the audience knows what his original target was [the senator Charles Palantine]. If he had hit the politician, that would have made him a negative celebrity" as "Scorsese makes the ironic point that society values the gunslinger's vigilante justice, while showing what a bloody mess it really was, and how easily it could have been the slayings of a politician instead" (131). 31 Robert Kolker writes of how "[t]he 'salvation' [Travis] receives, the recognition he gains for gunning down a mafioso and freeing a young runaway is simply ironic, the result of other people's distorted perceptions, and in no way changes the central character or his inability to understand himself or his world" (231). 32. Screenwriter Paul Schrader, who wrote a book of film criticism, described how he "saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero [...] the man from The Stranger, Notes from the Underground [...] Pickpocket [...] and put him in an American context" (Thompson 10).

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Thomas Bevilacqua was raised in Alameda, California. He attended the University of

Texas at Austin, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2008. He received his master’s degree in English from Wake Forest University in 2010. He moved to Tallahassee in

2011 to begin his doctoral degree at Florida State University, focusing on twentieth-century fiction and religion, specifically Catholicism. While at Florida State, he also participated in the

Graduate English Student Organization, serving as their president for the 2015-2016 academic year, and was the Assistant to the Director of Graduate Studies from 2012-2015.

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