A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[alice wellintown]

O'Connor is funny. Indeed, she describes her work as comic, though she
insists that her comedy does not distract from the seriousness of her
themes. We are invited to laugh at the violent misfits, at the
southern inanities, the gothic rags that fix the characters in a faded
fashion of the southern decadence. Our laughter makes us complicit,
for we cannot sustain indifference and the rejection of her grace,
especially on political or anti-religious grounds is only a
Calvinistic vice inherent in the reader not the author or her story.
There is nothing depressing about this; indeed, the grace that
O'Connor uses so skillfully, is a comic element, a carnivalesque
celebration of freedom, of the free will. So Harry swims away from
Paradise, in O'Connor's brilliant tale, "The River", and toward God's
Grace. Like Slothrop, or Oedipa, or Dorothy, Harry is running from
home and back to a Kansas that is, we fell, not Kansas anymore, a
Zone, a paralax of parallel universes moving toward Grace.

So, Pynchon and O'Connor, two Catholics, make use of Grace. The trick
is to understand what Catholic Grace is, and, as Mark intimated, how
it is not Calvinized.

Of course, the religion of the author, of the reader, matters not at
all. But not knowing what an author is up to, or rejecting it in
preference to some inhernet vice, some irrational disdain for all
things cultic, is a limited way to read demanding fictions.