{"id":16680,"date":"2015-05-06T15:22:43","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T21:22:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=16680"},"modified":"2015-05-07T09:59:19","modified_gmt":"2015-05-07T15:59:19","slug":"revenge-porn-for-the-righteous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2015\/05\/revenge-porn-for-the-righteous\/","title":{"rendered":"Revenge Porn for the Righteous"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In its Christmas, 2014 issue, the Catholic literary magazine Dappled Things published a link<\/a> to \u201cThank You for the Light,\u201d<\/a> a story submitted by F. Scott Fitzgerald to The New Yorker in 1936. In only 1,200 words, Fitzgerald recounts how Mrs. Hanson, a \u201cpretty, somewhat faded woman of forty\u201d who sells corsets and girdles, faces disapproval from her buyers whenever she pulls out a cigarette. \u201cSmoking,\u201d Fitzgerald explains, \u201chad some ability to rest and relax her psychologically\u2026[it] had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.\u201d But this cuts no ice with her associates \u2013 apparently, the same Pecksniffs who kept H.L. Mencken in business. <\/p>\n

Ground down by her job and sensing the onset of a nicotine fit, Mrs. Hanson ducks into a Catholic cathedral. She figures: \u201cif so much incense had gone up in the spires to God, a little smoke in the vestibule would make no difference. How could the Good Lord care if a tired woman took a few puffs in the vestibule?\u201d But then she realizes her matches are gone and learns all the votive candles are about to be snuffed out for the night. After nodding off before a statue of the Virgin, she wakes up to discover that some mysterious power has lit the cigarette in her hand.<\/p>\n

The New Yorker ran the story in August, 2012, but only as a curious artifact: initially, it rejected it as \u201ctoo fantastic.\u201d As a smoker who can\u2019t stand for his life\u2019s sentences to run unpunctuated for long, I could be biased, but I found it charming \u2013 an urban update of Anatole France\u2019s \u201cOur Lady\u2019s Juggler\u201d told with just enough irony to balance the fantasy. What really makes the story a keeper is something much more basic: It shows God \u2013 or at any rate, Mary \u2013 being nice. In other words, it\u2019s not a Flannery O\u2019Connor story.<\/p>\n

I recently ran across an article in Thema, the Reformed Evangelical journal, where a writer named Douglas Jones claims to find something<\/a> \u201codd about selling Flannery O\u2019Connor to Christians.\u201d Jones\u2019 Christians like their divine Grace tidy and pleasant. Or as O\u2019Connor herself put it, \u201cthey think faith is a big electric blanket.\u201d They\u2019d rather not pray to a God who might play a sick practical joke on them.<\/p>\n

Douglas Jones needs to get out more, especially among Catholics. Where I come from, you can\u2019t have a decent Facebook exchange without someone quoting \u201cFlannery\u201d \u2013 yes, fans speak of her familiarly, as though she were the current GOP front-runner. (Does anyone refer to \u201cEvelyn\u201d?) It\u2019s plain that these readers love O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories, not despite the brutal, often telegraphed endings, but because of them. They actually prefer their Grace dark. In their view, any other kind is second-rate \u2013 a knock-off Grace you might buy at a swap meet.<\/p>\n

This may reflect a purely artistic judgment. For some, the working of God\u2019s hand may just make for livelier reading when it\u2019s violent and disruptive. That\u2019s a defensible opinion, though one that raises the question of why so many of the same people will submerge themselves for thousands of pages in the company of Hobbits. It could also be that dark grace rings truer than any other kind to some folks\u2019 own life experience, although it seems to me these folks must have had it pretty rough in order not to find Norton\u2019s fate in \u201cThe Lame Shall Enter First\u201d way over the top.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve always feared is that Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s most devoted fans take such a pessimistic view of human nature that they believe God can hold people\u2019s attention only when he\u2019s kicking them in the teeth. Douglas Jones never comes right out and says this, but I believe he hints at it here:<\/p>\n

You soon realize how her visitations of dark grace stand out as huge gifts when compared to actual life. Most people\u2019s actual lives seem to be Flannery characters who never have the privilege of meeting dark grace. Think of the people around you. Think of the secularists. Most go on for decades in their self-deception and self-righteousness and pettiness until their bitterness just grinds to a close at the end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Every sentence here begs a question. Maybe I\u2019m lucky, but I don\u2019t know too many people as purely or narrowly self-righteous or self-deceptive as Flannery O\u2019Connor characters, though most of us have our moments. Dark Grace might count as a huge gift and a privilege if no other kind were available (kind of like how, if it weren\u2019t for bad luck, those Hee-Haw singers would have no luck at all). But kinder, gentler forms of Grace do exist and, I suspect, could be shown to have about the same retention rate, flock-wise, as the flashy, nasty kind. Many of the recipients, including me and anyone reading this from outside an iron lung, may not deserve it, but that\u2019s why they call it Grace and not a pension.<\/p>\n

None of this is meant to knock Flannery O\u2019Connor. Quite apart from her mastery of pacing and dialogue, her ear for dialect and her genius for allusion, she kept her faith even after suffering a fate about as bad as any of her characters\u2019. When it came to dark Grace, she earned the right to talk. But for many of us who have had it easier, claiming her vision and overidentifying with her point of view \u2014 Flannery-ing her, you might say \u2014 is a little too much like indulging in revenge porn for the righteous.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Grotesque in Southern Fiction,\u201d O\u2019Connor complained about critics who accused her of lacking compassion. \u201cCompassion,\u201d she wrote, \u201cis a quality which no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense\u2026Usually I think what is meant by it is that the writer excuses all human weakness because human weakness is human.\u201d She\u2019s right on both counts, and damn those New York interleckshuls for using such a blob of a word to signify what they found missing from her work. They should have come right out and told her, somewhat after the manner of St. Francis de Sales: \u201cLady, why don\u2019t you try lighting people\u2019s cigarettes instead of lighting their whole damn heads on fire?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In its Christmas, 2014 issue, the Catholic literary magazine Dappled Things published a link to \u201cThank You for the Light,\u201d a story submitted by F. Scott Fitzgerald to The New Yorker in 1936. In only 1,200 words, Fitzgerald recounts how Mrs. Hanson, a \u201cpretty, somewhat faded woman of forty\u201d who sells corsets and girdles, faces […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1218,49,1225,1226,1224,1219,90,470,1221,1227,208,1222,1223,1220,1217],"class_list":["post-16680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anatole-france","tag-catholicism","tag-dappled-things","tag-douglas-jones","tag-evelyn-waugh","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-h-l-mencken","tag-our-ladys-juggler","tag-reformed-evangelical-church","tag-saints","tag-thank-you-for-the-light","tag-the-lame-shall-enter-first","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-thema"],"yoast_head":"\nRevenge Porn for the Righteous<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In its Christmas, 2014 issue, the Catholic literary magazine Dappled Things published a link to \u201cThank You for the Light,\u201d a story submitted by F. 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