TEILHARD DE CHARDIN’S VIEW OF DIMINISHMENT AND THE LATE STORIES OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR by STEVEN ROBERT WATKINS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON December 2005 Copyright © by Steven Robert Watkins 2005 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A special thank you is in order for the chairman of my doctoral committee, Dr. Thomas Porter, whose guidance and help was needed in order to bring this scholastic undertaking to completion. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee, whose insight helped in the task: Dr. Denny Bradshaw, Dr. Phillip Cohen, Dr. Martin Danahay, and Dr. Kenneth Roemer. Thank you to my parents, Harold and Esta Watkins, who provided encouragement and prayer in this endeavor. They have stood by me throughout this process and have given me the love for education. I would like to thank the late Dr. William Hendricks, who instilled in me a love for truth and intellectual rigor. He helped me to see that truth is worth seeking, even when it takes much effort. November 11, 2005 iii ABSTRACT TEILHARD DE CHARDIN’S VIEW OF DIMINISHMENT AND THE LATE STORIES OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR Publication No. _____ Steven Robert Watkins The University of Texas at Arlington, 2005 Supervising Professor: Thomas Porter Scholars have used different approaches to study and interpret the work of Flannery O’Connor; those approaches have ranged from Feminism to New Criticism to religious (Christian and non-Christian) to psychological. These attempts to analyze and interpret her work have produced a diverse approach to understanding this intriguing author, who lived only to the age of thirty-nine because of lupus erythematosus. The approach of this dissertation is that the presence of this disease in her life caused her to look for ways to resolve and adapt to the limitations of the disease. One prominent source for reflecting and resolving the situation was the influence of Teilhard de Chardin. Beginning in May of 1959, when she first heard of him, through the summer of 1964, when she died of the disease, she read, reviewed, and discussed his ideas in an increasing manner. In that five-year period, she had collected eight books written by and about him, written numerous reviews about his work for the Bulletin, the local Catholic diocesan paper, iv mentioned him numerous times in her letters, and talked about him with acquaintances. Chardin’s concept of progressive diminishment in convergence helped her to resolve and adapt to the pervading limitations of her long-term disease. Through two books that O’Connor found provocative, The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, she discovered a philosophical framework called progressive diminishment operating in convergence. The gist of this Teilhardian idea is that human beings evolve throughout time developing a propensity towards psychic development as they journey towards a destination called Point Omega. Some psychic development characteristics are possession of a central body of knowledge, the concept of community, and the ability to reflect on existence. Since progressive diminishment helped O’Connor resolve and adapt to the presence of lupus erythematosus in the last five years of her life, she incorporated his ideas into her posthumous collection “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” This psychological approach analyzes the link between them and focuses on how his ideas influenced the development of literary elements in this collection. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................... iv Chapter I. CATEGORIES OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S WORK ................................ 1 II. HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL INTEREST IN TEILHARD DE CHARDIN .......................................................................... 11 III. DIMINISHMENT AND THE TEILHARDIAN VISION .................................. 34 IV. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE ........................................ 51 V. THE ENDURING CHILL .................................................................................. 82 VI. THE LAME SHALL ENTER FIRST................................................................. 108 VII. REVELATION ................................................................................................... 124 VIII. PARKER=S BACK.............................................................................................. 146 IX. JUDGEMENT DAY........................................................................................... 164 X. CONCLUSION................................................................................................... 183 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................... 190 BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT.................................................................................... 198 vi CHAPTER I CATEGORIES OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S WORK Flannery O=Connor has intrigued and flustered critics for over fifty years; she has been described as religiously insightful to mentally psychotic. Critics have looked at her from many perspectives and possible influences; Sarah Gordon, in Flannery O=Connor: The Obedient Imagination points out that in addition to her Catholic faith, Aother factors are at playCher southern upbringing, her femaleness, the early loss of her father, her serious illness, her complex relationship with her mother, her attraction to the banal and bizarre, her sense of humor, her early interest in satire. .(47) and, as critic Jon Lance Bacon has recently argued in Flannery O=Connor and Cold War Culture, her assimilation of and response to the social and political issues of the cold war@ (47). Josephine Hendin acknowledges the same situation; she talks about the motivations for writing that a person undertakes. In the case of Flannery O=Connor, she notes that the impulse, or necessity, came from being AIrish-American, a Southern woman, the offspring of an old Georgia family, and a victim of lupus, the wasting, degenerative disease that struck her at twenty-five and eventually killed her, than with being part of the Roman Catholic Church@ (4). Controversy and argument has pulsed through Flannery O=Connor scholarship in pursuit of the best possible answer. Often scholars like Robert Brinkmeyer, Cynthia Seel, Ralph Wood have focused exclusively on her public goals as a writer and used these assumptions as a template in assessing and interpreting her literature, and at other times, other scholars like Carol Schloss, Josephine Hendin, Andre 1 2 Bliekastan have exclusively employed psychological and sociological analysis in understanding her. If one is to understand and appreciate the work of Flannery O=Connor, then a template will help understand the author and her work. An analogy that would be helpful would be studying a volcano from satellite images. One would get an overall view of the energy on the surface, but not be aware of the intense, convulsive energy underneath the surface. Lupus erythematosus is an important fissure through which the convulsive energy churning in Flannery O=Connor=s life flowed to the top and exhibited itself. This physical condition in O=Connor=s life deserves more attention. Flannery O=Connor, from her birth until her death at the age of thirty-nine in 1964, lived under the shadow of lupus; her father contracted and died from it at an early age and she suffered from the effects of the debilitating disease from the age of twenty-two until her death. During this period of her life she wrote most of her short stories and novels. For the collection of stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge, she borrowed a phrase Aeverything that rises must converge@ from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin=s book The Phenomenon of Man and incorporated it as the title. In this collection Flannery O=Connor presents personae who encounter or live with notable disabilities (physical and psychological), and who struggle with these limitations throughout the action of the different short stories. Towards the end of the composition of this collection, her battle with lupus was drawing to a close, eventually ending her life in 1964 at the age of thirty-nine. With her reading of and familiarity with the works of the Jesuit paleontologist, she develops the concept of progressive diminishment operating in convergence, which she explores through the literary elements (narrator, characters, action, themes) of the stories in the collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. This template, if used by readers, helps them to 3 appreciate a new found focus discovered on how God works in humanity. In order to appreciate this proposition, it would be helpful to discuss the different views that have developed about her work over the years. One school of O=Connor scholarship falls under the rubric of mythic or mystic. Some critics have viewed her work as Southern Gothic/grotesque; in this view her Adiminished@ people are seen as freaks, idiots, half-wits, deaf mutes, unruly women, conmen, and Aadult@ children, who are marginal members of society. She uses such personae for different reasons, for instance, as an expression of the author=s feeling of isolation or opposition to society. Dr. Patricia Yeager thinks that