A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[Markekohut]

Like. Lit crit to learn from. The shout-out to me might skew my judgment. 

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 2, 2012, at 7:54 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.