https://twitter.com/TheUnNovelist/status/481433275739947008
Hilton Als delves into some of the lesser-explored themes in Flannery O’Connor’s A Prayer Journal, such as the ambiguous role of love and desire in her thinking as a young graduate student in Iowa:
In the journal O’Connor keeps trying to break free of her erotic desires as she tries to break through to God, the better for Him to see her, direct her…. She wants to be a good artist, but an artist with the complicated task of making His word live in a changing world. To not achieve this would be to “feel my loneliness continually.” God came before carnal love, and work came before other people. Like any young artist—and some not so young—O’Connor criticizes, in the journal, a number of other writers, the better to see herself. One way to make a world is to exclude others from it.
She reads Proust with a certain amount of admiration but distaste, too:
his depiction of sex and desire does not resonate with supernatural love, that which links one to the Divine. Instead, he depicts the perverse, which is “wrong.” … It would be easy enough to dismiss O’Connor’s aversion to Proust’s view of love if one did not hear the putdown in it. Back then, certain aspects of difference were punishable by law. Gay men, for instance, were still being arrested because of their desire; black men were being lynched for imagined infractions against white women. O’Connor’s moral stance is often fascinating when it comes to ideas about fiction. And when she limits her moralizing to herself, and the split she feels between the “I” of authorship and her self-disgust when that “I” asserts itself the better to write the words we’re reading—“I do not know You God because I am in the way. Please help me push myself aside”—O’Connor writes like no one else.
Previous Dish on O’Connor’s youthful journals here, here, and here, and a quote from them here.
The Dish 