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A Comparative Study of Fonn and Theology in the Works of Flannery O'connor and Simone Weil by Catherine Ann Maxwell

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A Comparative Study of Fonn and Theology in the Works of Flannery O'connor and Simone Weil by Catherine Ann Maxwell A Comparative Study of Fonn and Theology in the Works of Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil by Catherine Ann Maxwell. ~ Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of PhD The University of Leeds, The School of English. August 1998. The candidate confmns that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. 1 ABSTRACT In this comparative study of the form and theology of Flannery O'Connor and Simone Weil I interrogate how Weil's philosophical writings and her theology illuminate O'Connor's use of both narrative and non-fictional forms, and her Catholicism. The Introduction analyses how Weil's concept of superposed reading provides a new method of approaching both O'Connor, her writings, and O'Connor studies, and focuses on how such apparently different women interconnect. Chapter One explores how both Weil and O'Connor attempt to write their theologies on the souls of their readers yet are each subject to constraints imposed by form. Weil's concept of locating equilibrium between incommensurates is discussed, and her distinctively philosophical approach to fictions and fictionality is used to investigate O'Connor's notion of prophetic fictions and the writer's role. Chapter Two assesses how both writers revivify Christian paradoxes. Weil's monstrous concept of affiiction, and O'Connor's use of the grotesque genre to jolt secular man into an awareness of the sacred are scrutinised. Chapter Three studies how both writers consider an encounter between God and man is possible through the action of grace. My Conclusion interrogates how Weil's work can deepen our understanding of O'Connor's writings, and examines how successful O'Connor is at realising a truly Christian literature. I conclude that despite being a writer of powerful fictions, O'Connor can not be totally successful in her mission as writer-prophet because ultimately fiction escapes orthodoxy. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements 3 List of Abbreviations 4 Introduction: Superposed Readings 6 Chapter One: Writing on the Soul 62 Chapter Two: Interesting Monstrosities: Affliction, Grotesquerie 121 and the Strangeness of Truth Chapter Three: Dark and Disruptive Grace: Spiritual Mechanics 195 and the Violent Seed Conclusion: Deeper and Stranger Visions 242 Bibliography 265 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is dedicated to the Maxwells: each and every one, who have given me their complete encouragement and support from the first day of this project until the last. To my inspirational family I offer my grateful and sincere thanks. I would also like to acknowledge my appreciation for the assistance of all my friends, and their untiring faith in both me and my work. Finally, I would like to thank the School of English, the University of Leeds, for its help, and scholarship monies received for research during the period 1993·96. 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS (Full publication details in the Bibliography) FLANNERY O'CONNOR: CFO Conversations with Flannery 0 'Connor CS The Complete Stories CW The Collected Works FOCB The Flannery 0 'Connor Bulletin HB The Habit ofBeing MFC The Manuscripts ofFlannery 0 'Connor MM Mystery and Manners PG The Presence ofGrace VB The Violent Bear It Away WB WiseSlood FLN First and Last Notebooks GG Gravity and Grace IC Intimations ofChristianity Among the Ancient Greeks LP Leiter to A Priest LPY Lectures on Philosophy NB The Notebooks Volumes I-II NR The Need for Roots OL Oppression and Liberty 5 SE Selected Essays SL Seventy Letters SNL On Science, Necessity and the Love ofGod SWR The Simone Wei! Reader WFG Waiting/or God 6 INTRODUCTION: SUPERPOSED READINGS 'Every being cries out silently to be read differently' according to Simone Wei1. 1 The Weilean tenn 'reading' involves the activity of interpretation, usually subjective emotional responses, or confonnity to public opinion which generate incorrect judgements of individuals, texts, and events. 'We read, but also we are read by others' she maintains, which is a 'mechanical process. More often than not a dialogue between deaf people' (GG 121-122). Accurate interpretation requires a superior quality of attention, a change of perspective that facilitates 'Superposed readings,2 in which two or more distinct elements are viewed simultaneously, and alternative realities are recognised beyond surface appearances. Flannery O'Connor 'cries out' loudly to be read differently in two ways. First, she personally demands her audience read her fictions differently, and second, despite the voluminous critical material available, O'Connor's work calls for new interpretations. Preoccupied by what she considers the incorrect explications of her narratives by readers deaf to her Christian concerns, O'Connor demands her audience changes its perspective to accord with her own 'anagogical vision', which operating on an equivalent principle to Weil's superposed readings, combines both literal and spiritual realities in a single vista.3 'The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision', O'Connor insists, and this 'anagogical vision' is the kind 'that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or in one situation'. and is concerned 'with the Divine life and our participation in it' (MM 72). But believing she is read by a hostile audience unwilling or unable to hear her Christian message and perceive this superposed reality. O'Connor claims 'you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout. and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures' (MM 34). But have too many of O'Connor's critics been deafened and blinded by her non-fictional fonns of communication: the lectures. essays, letters. and book reviews in which she so emphatically states her anagogical intent in the narratives? Has too large a portion of O'Connor criticism itself become a mechanical process in which O'Connor's comments about her fictions have been so successful in reorientating the critical debate. that her readers too readily accept the stories as prophetic Christian parables. rather than complex, ambiguous narratives which offer both spiritual readings and alternative literal interpretations which undercut them? Frank Kennode's distinction between 'outsiders' who generate literal, 'carnal' interpretations of texts, and 'insiders', an elect band of critics who produce profound 7 'spiritual' readings through a process of 'aural circumcision',4 is useful here in examining O'Connor's work. the state of O'Connor criticism, and how a study of Simone Weil can make a contribution to it. According to Kermode there is 'seeing and hearing, which are what naive listeners and readers do~ and there is perceiving and understanding, which are in principle reserved to an elect' (Kermode, Genesis, 3). The elect obtain their insider status by affirming the superiority of latent over manifest senses, and by a process of 'aural circumcision'. in which the next generation of elect interpreters is initiated into access to, and control of, these privileged spiritual interpretations.5 Amongst these initiates there is 'a preference for spiritual over carnal readings - that is, for interpretations that are beyond the hearing of outsiders', he argues (18). Due to prior expectations of unity, all readers search for textual consonance, but while outsiders only recognise the most obvious literal features, elect interpreters search for occult relations not manifested in the narrative. Locating latent senses in a text requires a 'moment of interpretation or act of 'divination' in which an 'impression point' is discovered.6 This crucial juncture 'gives sense and structure to the whole', there may be one or several such moments, but they can only be justified if reconciled with the whole narrative or oeuvre (16, 17). O'Connor's preference for what she considers the 'intelligent reader' capable of perceiving profound (religious) meanings in her narratives, rather than the 'average reader', who is merely amused by their surface levels (MM 95), corresponds to Kermode's concept of insider and outsider exegetists. Similarly, her equation of the 'legitimate' use of the grotesque genre with prophecy, and insistence that what makes narratives, and specifically her own narratives successful is an anagogical action or gesture which makes 'contact with mystery' (111): this amounts to a demand that her readers perform an act of divination in order to discover the impression point in her texts, and perceive the spiritual rather than see only the manifest. 7 But are such interpretations supported by the narratives, or reliant on aural circumcision, in which O'Connor's non-fictional work prepares an elect group of literary disciples to maintain her anagogical readings - which are actually alienated from the outsiders who see and hear, rather than perceive and understand? According to Ben Satterfield 'it was O'Connor who told the critics how to read her, and they responded like so many Pavlovian dogs,. 8 So are her anagogical readers, in their desire to make acts of divination, acting like Pavlovian critics and substituting O'Connor's claimed interventions of grace in the stories for unsubstantiated epiphanies? If as Kermode argues, 'Carnal readings are much the same. Spiritual 8 readings are all different' (9), after over forty years of O'Connor criticism have anagogical interpretations of her work become themselves carnal? In response to these questions I have three points to argue. First, the process of 'aural circumcision' is evident in much of O'Connor's non-fictional work, and many of her critics' commentaries, and this has played a significant part in promoting the merits of exclusively anagogical interpretations of the fictions, which readings of the narratives frequently do not justify.9 Second, an over-reliance on O'Connor's statements of Christian orthodoxy and intention to communicate her religious beliefs to her audience, often results in readers neglecting to acknowledge O'Connor's equally significant observations on the need for her narratives to be considered as fictions, not just theology.
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