S ONJA S CHILLINGS Hulga Sees Through to Nothing: Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety Great literature - or literature that is in the process of being canonized as “great literature” - is conventionally characterized as reaching beyond time and space. Especially the notion of timelessness is a particularly important topic of debate in interpretations of the work of Flannery O’Connor, as it is often directly associated with her orthodox Catholic viewpoint. This perspective, a traditional argument in O’Connor studies goes, allows O’Connor to ground her fiction in a metaphysical truth regime destined to outlast any historically specific situation. 1 In response, secular critics in O’Connor studies have responded by historicizing O’Connor’s work, suggesting that her work is as historically situated as that of any other author in any other given historical period. Interestingly, these critics usually base their arguments on O’Connor’s understanding of secular institutions such as the creative writing program or the welfare state, 2 In this essay, I propose that the metaphysical dimension of O’Connor’s work itself can be “secularized” in the sense of a synthesis between what is usually read as “religious” and “secular” in her fiction. I make this claim on the basis of two observations. First, both the secular and religious discourses that O’Connor engaged with in her fiction were institutionally bound discourses; second, all of these institutions taken together responded to a massive cultural change that came with the conclusion of the Second World War. but do not necessarily dispute that the metaphysical elements of O’Connor’s work remain firmly Catholic. 1 See e.g. Robert H. Brinkmeyer, The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1989), Jordan Cofer, The Gospel According to Flannery O’Connor: Examining the Role of The Bible in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), Anthony DiRenzo, American Gargoyles: Flannery O’Connor and the Medieval Grotesque (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1993), John Hawkes, “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil,” Sewanee Review 70 (1962): 395-407, Henry McDonald, “The Moral Meaning of Flannery O’Connor,” Modern Age 24: 3 (1980): 273-282, Joyce Carol Oates, “The Visionary Art of Flannery O’Connor,” Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 43-53. 2 See e.g. John Lance Bacon, Flannery O’Connor and Cold War Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), Susan Edmunds, Grotesque Relations: Modernist Domestic Fiction and the U.S. Welfare State (Oxford,: Oxford UP, 2008), Michael Kreyling, ed., New Essays on Wise Blood (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009). S ONJA S CHILLINGS 188 It is in the context of the institutional history of the 1950s that secular and religious references in O’Connor’s work can be brought together, and can be seen in direct dialogue with the aesthetic choices made in her fiction - they can even be synthesized as fundamental perspectives on the world and the human being as such, since all of the relevant institutions of the time respond to a shared need for fundamental categorical revision, and engage in a mostly constructive dialogue with each other. In order to elaborate on this claim, I will discuss one of O’Connor’s most famous and most frequently discussed short stories, “Good Country People” of 1955, showing how the possibility of ideological synthesis is explored here. I will then move on to historicize the context of O’Connor’s writing in the greater cultural context of the United States after 1945, including a discussion of the Catholic Church as an international institution strongly invested in a dialogue with emerging secular international institutions. This dialogue was mainly grounded in a shared development of human dignity as a category that emerged to shape Western culture in the post-Holocaust atomic age. 1. An Interpretation of “Good Country People” The short story “Good Country People” features a comparatively wellknown plot. The protagonist is a one-legged woman called Joy Hopewell who had her first name legally changed to Hulga. Hulga is drawn as an isolated, hostile and frustrated figure. She is thirty-two years old, an atheist, and has a PhD in philosophy. Due to a heart condition, she is forced to live not as an aspiring university lecturer but as a dependent of her mother, the owner of an isolated farm in the rural South. A travelling Bible salesman comes to her mother’s house, presents himself as a simple country boy, and claims to have the same heart condition as Hulga. Hulga is drawn to him because she assumes they are both doomed, and that he therefore understands her outlook on life better than anyone else could. She attempts to seduce him, and imagines “that she took his remorse in hand and changed it into a deeper understanding of life. She took all of his shame away and turned it into something useful.” 3 3 Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” The Complete Stories, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), 284. All references to the short story “Good Country People” in this essay refer to this edition, and are hereafter abbreviated as GCP. This expectation of Hulga’s never materializes; the tables are turned. The Bible salesman manipulates Hulga into entering a trap. He is not a Bible salesman after all, but a cruel imposter. He leads her onto a remote barn loft, steals her leg and her glasses, and leaves her stranded and trapped, her naivety cruelly mocked and her prostheses stolen as two of many trophies in a morbid collection whose purpose remains unexplained. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 189 Like virtually all of O’Connor’s stories, “Good Country People” is a grotesque in the sense that its moral remains elusive, and that the narrative does not eventually collapse into an unambiguously tragic or comic, or in any significant sense formulaic, mode. Any interpretation of such a grotesque therefore has to reach beyond the plot of the story, and has to look for meaning in the metaphysical considerations that may make the story’s structure meaningful. In O’Connor studies, this story is conventionally interpreted as a tale of poetic justice, featuring the righteous divine punishment of a protagonist who is not only an atheist, but also claims to be a nihilist who exhibits a particularly secular arrogance. 4 O’Connor creates plausibility for such a reading by drawing links between the two characters of Hulga and the Bible salesman such as the different but related qualities of their belief in nothing, references to their respective fathers, and their corresponding usage of self-given names as enabling devices - devices that the Bible salesman indeed puts to use much more skillfully than Hulga, thus indicating his superiority in these matters (GCP 275, 291). Also, the Bible salesman’s robbery is made significant because Hulga’s wooden leg constitutes the central “loaded” element of the story that all characters gravitate around and articulate a perspective on. The leg is also directly linked to Hulga’s essence as a character. Having the leg on her body keeps her radically aloof and in control, but as soon as the leg is detached from her body, Hulga surrenders to the Bible salesman. In this sense, as O’Connor herself emphasizes, For this, she is punished by literary devil and Christian author. 5 Yet there are two elements of the story that render such a reading somewhat superficial, and these are the elements I want to focus on in this essay. The first is the role of Hulga’s heart condition in the composition of the story; the second is a term in the story that is just as loaded as the wooden leg. This loaded element is the term “nothing.” I suggest that the significance of the heart condition and that of the term “nothing” together can be read with benefit against the larger relationship of the cultural reality of the “Age of Anxiety.” there is great significance to the leg as an element of the story, and since it is stolen, one might indeed find plausibility in the reading that she is now bereft of the principles that characterized her, and ripe for a divine act of grace. 6 4 This view corresponds with O’Connor’s own retrospective interpretation of the story. See Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 98-99. 5 Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 99. 6 Ralph Ellison, “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” Going to the Territory (New York: Vintage, 1987), 272. S ONJA S CHILLINGS 190 The heart condition operates differently in “Good Country People” (1955) than it does in other O’Connor stories that feature a protagonist with a heart condition, such as “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” (1953) or “A View of the Woods” (1957). These other stories both end with the protagonist having a stroke that coincides with the shattering of an unsustainable world view. In contrast, “Good Country People” forgoes this potential of the heart condition in the story’s conclusion. In this story, the heart condition is exclusively used to contextualize the story’s setting. It constitutes a shadow of doom that informs family life on the farm in unspoken but still acutely perceptible ways. To Hulga, the heart condition is one of the most basic “categories of Being, like Space and Time.” 7 On a structural level, the heart condition achieves three things. First, it traps Hulga in this life rather than any other; it is the sole reason why she is not a happy lecturer but an embittered dependent, surrounded by people with whom she cannot meaningfully communicate. Second, the heart condition renders her death a constant possibility for characters and reader alike; it raises a reader expectation that is materialized in the other two stories, but not here. In “Good Country People,“ something more interesting happens: Hulga is a character who is expected to die, and she is aware of this expectation. The heart condition inscribes Hulga as consciously entrapped in her narrative universe as well as in her likely fictional function long before the Bible salesman comes along: because of the heart condition, she is entrapped by her existential knowledge of certain death, and the problem of a possibly futile life and perspective. Third, only this shared, conscious anticipation of death makes Hulga assume that she can communicate with the Bible salesman in the first place, and despite their many social and personal differences - she, the grown-up, atheist daughter of a landowner who has “a number of degrees” (GCP 288), he, the young, uneducated and impoverished fundamentalist. As a feature of Hulga’s individual life, the heart condition is characterized as a threat that is vast, vague and unchangeable, invisible but always existentially present, a central factor that shapes the narrative universe and the constellations found therein. In this vein, we have to understand the Bible salesman’s theft of the leg (which results in her being stranded helplessly on a barn loft) not as the central turning point of the story, but merely as a logical consequence of the story’s exposition: as a trap within a trap. If we want to understand the scene’s significance, we have to leave the Bible salesman’s actions aside for a moment, and focus on what we know of Hulga as a philosopher (GCP 276) whom the reader expects to die due to the clues provided by the story, and who is characterized by her struggle with the awareness that she is expected to 7 Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light. American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1994), xx. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 191 die. This awareness of, and struggle with, the larger trap only causes her to step into the smaller trap. In “Good Country People,“ Hulga is constantly treated like someone who is almost already dead, and this social death is indeed directly linked to her leg. Her mother Mrs. Hopewell cherishes the memory of her daughter as a child in a state of quiet mourning, and it is the loss of her leg - accidentally shot off, as we come to understand, by Hulga’s father who was divorced by her mother as a consequence (GCP 274) - which marks this point of death for the mother. Mrs. Freeman, the farm manager, is fascinated by Hulga as an example of morbid decay because of the leg (GCP 275). The Bible salesman, in this context, appears almost like a grave robber. Hulga reacts to these objectifying constructions with the stomping over-emphasis of her living existence, combined with an ever-increasing abstraction of thought (GCP 275-6). However, Hulga as a character does not merely react to her condition and the perspectives of the characters around her; she has good reasons of her own for wanting to enter the barn loft, this trap within the trap. This is where we come to the second loaded element of the story, namely the term “nothing.” All of the characters in the story formulate a perspective on nothingness. 8 These perspectives on nothingness correspond directly to these characters’ different usages of language. The Bible salesman, who has always believed in nothing, speaks not to communicate but only to gain entry and to influence people; Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, for whom nothing is perfect, use redundancy in language to manage relationships and to circumvent any given elephant in the room. All three characters manipulate language elegantly and effectively, and use language only to secure and maintain a position, or to achieve a specific aim. Throughout the story, all three characters skillfully surf on the surface of language. This is a dimension which is emphasized as central in the very first passages of the story (GCP 271) as well as in the final paragraph, when the fiction of “good country peo- Hulga claims: “I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing” (GCP 287). The manipulative, abusive Bible salesman’s parting words to Hulga are: “I been believing in nothing ever since I was born! ” (GCP 291) Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, Hulga’s mother and her mother’s farm manager, safely contain any given elephant in the room with the words: “Nothing is perfect” (GCP 272). 8 Whenever I discuss “nothing” as a philosophical concept in this essay, I will use the term “nothingness.” This term was established as generally referring to philosophical conversations about “nothing” in the wake of the English translation of Sartre’s L’Être et le néant as Being and Nothingness. My use of “nothingness” only serves the purpose of better readability, and does not reflect any assumption that O’Connor herself directly alluded to Sartre’s book. The first translation of L’Être et le néant to English was published in 1956, a year after the publication of “Good Country People.” It is not likely that O’Connor encountered this work before its translation to English. S ONJA S CHILLINGS 192 ple” is used once more to draw attention to the alleged goodness, dullness, and simplicity of those three supporting characters who are in fact neither good, dull nor simple, but instead just do not use language to express their inner lives (GCP 272, 291). Hulga alone speaks for different reasons. She wants to penetrate the surface, she wants to see through to nothing. She tries to speak honestly to all of the other characters, and is constantly frustrated by her inability to communicate with other characters via language. This does not necessarily mean that she demands a certain standard of intellectual sophistication from them, but it means that she views language to serve as an entry point for knowledge, and wants it to be used accordingly (GCP 283). What is interesting about Hulga’s perspective on nothingness is that in her case, the context and usage of the term “nothing” are quite specific, and philosophical in a more literal sense. Martin Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics? ” is quoted in the text, and defines Hulga’s usage of the term. She generally alludes to the lecture at various times in the story when formulating her own perspective (GCP 275, 283-284, 287, 289). As her mother discovers, Hulga has underlined a passage of the lecture in a book: Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing - how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing. 9 In the lecture originally entitled “Was ist Metaphysik? ” (1929), this passage is part of the introductory remarks, followed by the observation that, paradoxically, whenever science seeks to evoke or formulate its own positivist nature, it still requires the acknowledgement or even usage of nothingness as an implicit but perspective-defining reference point. 10 Heidegger’s explicit observation of this paradox, which is not quoted in O’Connor, nevertheless underlies the three supporting characters’ responses to categorical nothingness, as the strong affective reaction of Hulga’s mother to the Heidegger passage as an “evil incantation in gibberish” already indicates (GCP 277). Like Heidegger’s scientists, the characters who use language only for tactical and strategic ends wish to know nothing of language’s ability to make “contact with mystery.” 11 In “What is Metaphysics? ” Heidegger suggests that reason - or scientific language geared toward frictionless communication - will not tell us the 9 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics? ” quoted in GCP 277. 10 Martin Heidegger, “Was ist Metaphysik? ” Wegmarken, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2013), 106. 11 Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 112. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 193 most relevant things about the nature and proper place of the human being in the world. In order to arrive at a better understanding of the human being, he argues, one has to consider the affective dimension, the moods, and above all the sensation of anxiety, as resources to understand how human beings are existentially situated in the world. What is special about being human according to Heidegger is the situatedness in nothingness; nothingness roughly refers to everything that radically transcends our capacity to reason. Heidegger argues that it is this groundedness in nothingness, rather than the groundedness in reason or even language, that makes us human in the first place. This groundedness in nothingness explicitly renders our own unknowability our greatest resource for knowledge. In science - and this is the characterization of science in the passage underlined by Hulga - we look at the world with prefabricated core assumptions about the world’s nature. But metaphysics in Heidegger’s sense means to go beyond these limitations of thought, and to probe the very core assumptions made by science, with the anticipated result that the nature of both world and human being will emerge as radically unpredictable and essentially unknowable. This lecture is directly associated with Hulga’s “nihilist” thought, yet she is not a character whose dramatic development culminates in a shattering of her nihilism. Indeed, her worldview cannot be shattered precisely because Hulga as a Heideggerian actively seeks to broaden her perspective via affective experience. This direct parallel of Hulga’s character to Heidegger’s take on nothingness works so well in the story because O’Connor can show and develop some aspects of the argument in the character of Hulga that Heidegger can only tell, or state as given, within the conventions of logical argument. For example, Heidegger enumerates some of the moods which indicate the presence of nothingness to us, and which make it experienceable as nothingness in the first place. He lists conditions of negation, annihilation, antagonism, rebuke, failure, privation, prohibition and corresponding feelings like anxiety, boredom, frustration, anger, sadness and bitterness. This mix of conditions and feelings is what Hulga, the entrapped philosopher, is informed by in the story from the start. She is the one who, in Heidegger’s view, is perfectly equipped to recognize the nature of nothingness. Because the relevant moods inform her completely, she cannot possibly avoid her conscious situatedness in nothingness. Hulga’s stated vocation, which is directly informed by this existential entrapment, is formulated as an open question: she wants to carve greatness from ugliness, understanding from remorse, and significance from shame; her preferred self-comparison is with Vulcan in his capacity as a “sweating” blacksmith and forger of divine things (GCP 275). In her dealings with the Bible salesman, she starts out with what she is capable of understanding (and therefore, of teaching) but does not necessarily have a particular vision of the S ONJA S CHILLINGS 194 “useful” outcome of their relationship. She primarily wants to seduce the Bible salesman in order to arrive at a “deeper understanding of life” primarily for him, but also for herself. The tables are turned, at first, by his taking her shame away instead of her removal of his. When Hulga surrenders to the Bible salesman by allowing him to detach her wooden leg, “her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at” (GCP 289). The formulation here indicates that Hulga, the philosopher, still remains within the fold of teacher and student, but has now taken the place of the student. At first, “the power [unleashed by kissing] went at once to the brain” (GCP 285), but is soon overwhelmed - for example, she does not notice him taking her glasses even though her mind allegedly “never stopped or lost itself for a second to her feelings” (GCP 287). Eventually, when she “surrender[s] to him completely,” [i]t was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his” (GCP 289). Hulga is cruelly rebuked when she attempts to read this brief joyful experience normatively (or, as Heidegger might say, scientifically), but her underlying vocation as a philosopher in the spirit of Heidegger is confirmed. Through those few moments of seduction before the situation disintegrates, Hulga comes face to face with the trusting exposure and surrender which Heidegger associates with the understanding of being in the world that complements the understanding of nothingness in the world. Heidegger associates the understanding of being with the notion of joy, which is Hulga’s own abandoned name; as Justin Albert Harrison formulates, “joy [in Heidegger] always arises alongside or in juxtaposition to anxiety or Dasein’s existence in relation to the nothing. […] [A]ngst is overcome by an attunement of joy as one abides in meditative thought and ‘releasement’ towards being.” 12 Harrison helpfully suggests that Heideggerian joy specifically deviates from “scientific” understandings of the earth which alienate the human being from the earth by opening up, instead, the possibility of human “rootedness” in the earth. 13 12 Justin Albert Harrison, Joy as Attunement and End in the Philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Loyola University Chicago, 2010), 165. This, in turn, resonates directly with the framing of the barnhouse scene via two parallelized scenes of Hulga gazing at the rural landscape (GCP 287, 291), and the conclusion of the story with Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman who are busy “digging up onions” and specifically removing “evil-smelling” ones from the earth (GCP 291). It is in this way that Joy-Hulga’s two names are reunited within the story, and allow 13 Ibid., 167. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 195 the confrontation with the Bible salesman to complete, rather than to disintegrate, her existing philosophical perspective. The construction of Hulga’s heart condition is subtly referenced to assist this Heideggerian framing of the barn loft scene. Her heart is shown to work particularly strongly after the Bible salesman’s treachery and departure. When Hulga gazes at the landscape a second time, she not only pays attention to the outside, but face is “almost purple” with blood flow, which, in the story’s final reference to Hulga, finds a variation as “her churning face” and is thus explicitly associated with a mood in Heidegger’s sense (GCP 290-291). By the end of the story, not much has changed on the surface of the narrative universe. Everything that is characteristic of the characters in the beginning remains just so. The Bible salesman keeps roaming the land, Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman keep working the land, and Hulga remains isolated above and away from them. The final description of Hulga’s face records the only actual character development of the story. At the outset, her “constant outrage had obliterated every expression from her face” (GCP 273). In notable contrast, the change into a “churning” face indicates that Hulga has become moved rather than remaining static, that she is now open - to an act of grace, perhaps, but more likely from within the construction of the story, to a full recognition of the relationship between being and nothingness. Joy, in this sense, refers to a philosophical category which can be re-integrated into Hulga in the same way that mystery as the primary element of human existence can be integrated into the tradition of reason in Heidegger: the acknowledgement of mystery does not mean the abandonment of reason, nor the denial of suffering, but simply points to an unspoken, fleeting and wondrous underlying dimension of humanity that requires both the acceptance of death as inevitable and life as inexhaustible. Likewise, the experience of Joy does not undo Hulga. At various points of this essay, I have drawn attention to a pattern in the structure of the story: a trap is embedded in a trap, a given name is embedded in a chosen name, the disability of a lost limb is embedded in a disabling heart condition, science is embedded in nothingness. As a result of the reading of nothingness proposed here, one could add to this list that philosophy 14 14 This means both Christian and existentialist philosophy. Though not explicitly discussed in this essay, the short story also features direct references to theological considerations of the soul. In particular, Nicolas Malebranche, who complicated the notion of the classic body-soul-dualism, is referenced in the story (GCP 276). This reference has not been extensively discussed here because it is much less structurally defining than the Heidegger reference. is embedded in literature, and it is in this sense that I propose to read the story as responsive to a particular moment of cultural change. It is indeed this context which makes such a framing not just plausi- S ONJA S CHILLINGS 196 ble, but almost inevitable, for a writer such as O’Connor who develops a consciously orthodox perspective to (late) modernist writing from within the doctrines of Catholic Church. This careful construction of interlaced concepts in the story corresponds with O’Connor’s larger perspective on “nihilism” in the institutional landscape of her time, and corresponds quite neatly with responses of the Catholic Church to the fundamental categorical reconstructions that characterize the postwar period. 2. Postwar International Institutions and Cultural Change In the aftermath of two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the caesura of the atom bomb as a new defining feature of human reality, the postwar period witnesses a fundamental reconsideration of all categories of being in the United States. American discourse of this time is characterized by paradoxes, not the least of which is the question of goodness and virtue in the American national character that, according to a number of commentators, had been “Hitlerize[d]” by mass warfare and especially by the decision to drop not one but two atom bombs on largely civilian targets. 15 World War I, the Depression, World War II and Korea, the Cold War, the threat of the atom, our discovery of the reality of treason, and now Egypt and Hungary make us aware that reality, which during Dickens’s time seemed fairly stable, has broken loose from its old historical base, and the Age of Anxiety is truly more than a poetic conceit. […] In fact, there is no stability anywhere and there will not be for many years to come, and progress now insistently asserts its tragic side; the evil now stares out of the bright sunlight. A language of absolute destabilization was almost universally resorted to in the United States. In 1957, O’Connor’s contemporary Ralph Ellison summarizes: 16 Regarding the atom bomb specifically, the cultural historian Paul Boyer emphasizes that “[i]t was surprising to note how quickly contemporary observers [between 1945 and 1950] understood that a profoundly unsettling new cultural factor had been introduced - that the bomb had transformed not only military strategy and international relations, but the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness.” 17 In other words, traditional categories of conceptualizing the human being were fundamentally under review in the American postwar period. A general cultural sense emerged that there must be something more important, more central to the human being than the capacity to reason if the capacity to 15 Dieter Georgi quoted in Lee-Anne Broadhead, “Our Day in Their Shadow: Critical Remembrance, Feminist Science and the Women of the Manhattan Project,” Peace and Conflict Studies 15: 2 (2009): 45. 16 Ellison 1987, 272. 17 Boyer 1994, xxi. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 197 reason could unleash mass destruction - including the potential future destruction of the United States on similarly “rational” grounds. 18 At the same time, as Ellison’s comment in particular indicates, this necessity to find different grounds for the value of every individual human life was grounded in a general sense of alienation and anxiety, and it is this condition which Flannery O’Connor means when she speaks of “nihilism” in 1955: “[I]f you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest [sic] logical positivist you ever saw right now.” 19 In this comment, O’Connor emphasizes as central the distinction between what Heidegger calls “science” and her own perspective, and directly embeds it into a political context of responding to the cultural changes of the World Wars. 20 In the emerging human rights regime after the Second World War, “human dignity” was legally defined as the human privilege not to be rendered an object. The emerging consensus definitions of human dignity in the twentieth century relied on originally Christian categories which were, in part, directly distilled into secular form in emerging international legal bodies. Her discussion of the Church in this short quote is interesting in its seeming ambiguity. On the one hand, the Church is informed by nihilism since nihilism, to O’Connor, is an overarching element of the contemporary human condition; on the other hand, the Church develops perspectives that lead even beyond its own nihilism. It is illuminating to consider the grounds for these perspectives which defy both “nihilism” and “positivism.” 21 18 William L. Laurence, Dawn over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 287. In the postwar period, religious speech and category was thus not the prerogative of explicitly religious commentators, but ran through all central institutional debates of the time. Human dignity was the term around which the most important philosophical questions of the time revolved: in the context of national debates on the American Way of Life, in the international debate on human rights, or in the metaphysical debate dominated by existentialism in the United States of the time, the notion of human dignity refers to an 19 Flannery O’Connor, “To A. 22 August 1955,” The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 97. 20 For example, a discussion of totalitarianism and the Holocaust directly leads up to the passage quoted here, as is still discernible in the use of the term “gas” which alludes to the Nazi concentration camps. Also note, in the context of this paper, the interesting parallel between the “evil-smelling onion” that is uprooted in “Good Country People” and the choice to characterize logical positivism (science, in Heidegger’s terms) as “stinky.” 21 Edward Peters, Torture: Expanded Edition (Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 148-155. S ONJA S CHILLINGS 198 important categorical enlargement in how to understand the human being in view of radically changed circumstances. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that these conversations on human dignity did not just capitalize on religious discourse and mine it for suitable categories, but that the Catholic Church in particular was itself a major institutional platform for these debates, and furthermore stood in active dialogue with secular institutional bodies. Today, the Catholic Church is routinely acknowledged as an important institutional contributor to the emergence of human dignity as an overarching postwar concept to counterbalance the existential cultural destabilization that O’Connor describes as nihilism. 22 Critics such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have suggested that this newly emerging understanding of dignity in the twentieth century did not, in fact, do much to counterbalance the atrocities of the twentieth century, but that the concept in fact reproduced a legal and biopolitical detachment of the legal categories of “human” and “person,” whereby the protected legal “person” that was endowed with dignity became more abstracted from actual human life than ever. 23 In the passages cited above, Boyer, Ellison and O’Connor all speak of the 1950s as a time that suddenly experiences an unprecedented new condition of reality which makes it virtually impossible for writers not to address the metaphysical dimension of human reality. The inclusion of this larger cultural context adds a significant dimension to O’Connor’s preoccupation with literature’s ability to make “contact with mystery,” and her claim that literature itself was capable of embodying this mystery for readers. However, a different interpretation of these historical developments is possible when literary fiction like O’Connor’s, rather than legal discourse alone, is drawn on for analytical contemplation. 24 22 See e.g. F. Russell Hittinger, “An Adequate Anthropology: Social Aspects of Imago Dei in Catholic Theology,” Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2013), 39-78, Christopher McCrudden, “In Pursuit of Human Dignity: An Introduction to Current Debates,” Understanding Human Dignity, ed. Christopher McCrudden (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 1-58, Michael Rosen, “Dignity Past and Present,” Dignity, Rank, and Rights, eds. Jeremy Waldron and Meir Dan-Cohen (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012), 79-98. It is a particularly interesting aside that Thomas Aquinas is one of the most prominent names referenced in Catholic dignity discourses of the twentieth century, given Flannery O’Connor’s great and enduring admiration of his perspective. Following 23 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999), 67-71, Roberto Esposito, Person und menschliches Leben (Zürich: diaphanes, 2010). 24 Flannery O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,“ 107-118, Flannery O’Connor, “The Teaching of Literature,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 121-134. Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Anxiety 199 this reasoning, human dignity should not merely be understood as equivalent to classic forms of agency (as Agamben and Esposito suggest), but instead as a notion that may precede traditional institutional characterizations of human agency - a notion that, by virtue of deliberately not being defined, 25 opens up a space to make contact with mystery without having to step outside of institutions to do so. Especially in the short story as a form that allowed writers virtually complete aesthetic control, it becomes an important idea that human life is capable of developing in ways that are unpredictable and may not be accessible to reason 26 because characters express something more fundamentally human than reason. Instead of a definition, the short story is capable of lending formal expression to the human mystery that finds a parallel formal expression in the institutional language of dignity - where, indeed, the understanding of human dignity as a “non-interpreted thesis” 27 It is precisely this latent cultural acknowledgement of human unknowability in the American postwar period that lent secular and religious discourses, philosophical and legal discourses, as well as institutional and literary discourses, a common metaphysical ground which had not previously existed. It is in this sense that O’Connor’s obsessive insistence on the depiction of human mystery is very timely, and her use of interlaced concepts as demostrated in “Good Country People” helps illuminate fundamental institutional re-visions (in the most literal sense) of her time. achieves a similar effect. In short, such a cultural climate rendered a sharp differentiation between religion and secularism, Catholicism and existentialism, philosophy and literature impossible to sustain; instead, this climate invited these conversations to emerge as intertwined elements of shared metaphysical questions. As 25 This becomes particularly evident in the often-quoted characterization of twentiethcentury human dignity as a “non-interpreted thesis.” See e.g. Christopher McCrudden, “In Pursuit of Human Dignity: An Introduction to Current Debates,” Understanding Human Dignity, ed. Christopher McCrudden (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 7. 26 In literary criticism, this development is often linked to the claim that mid-twentieth century literature tends to shift from a “drama of characters” to a “drama of situations” which foregrounds negotiations of the metaphysical dimension of a plot. See Hazel Barnes, The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P, 1959), 9-11. Such “existentialist” literature in the wider sense invites a sophisticated and increasingly professionalized mode of interpretation which coincides with writers’ own increasing institutional professionalization, a notion that is particularly important for O’Connor who was trained in the context of Creative Writing programs and remained faithful to the methods offered here. See e.g. McGurl 2009 and Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays by Susan Sontag (London: Penguin, 1966), 3-14. 27 Christopher McCrudden, “In Pursuit of Human Dignity: An Introduction to Current Debates,” Understanding Human Dignity, ed. Christopher McCrudden (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2013), 7. S ONJA S CHILLINGS 200 interpreters, it is necessary to acknowledge the historical fact of categorical revision in this period not only in the consideration of literary works that respond to disorientation by deviating from ‘classic’ forms of storytelling 28 In conclusion, Hulga’s survival and indeterminate philosophical politics by the end of the story - does she become a better secular philosopher, or does she become a Christian? - can be considered together by acknowledging the close proximity of these solutions in their shared rejection of “nihilism.” The Bible salesman can be a Christian devil as well as a secular manifestation of the banality of evil; what is important about him is that he does not value life but collects dead things, whereas Hulga arrives both at a greater understanding of the mystery of interpersonal relationships and the potentially joyful, enduring presence of the world - not despite, but through, her willingness to descend deeper into the trap that the story’s structure has laid out for her from the start. but also and perhaps especially in the work of writers like O’Connor who emphasize their own embeddedness in an institutional context of meaningmaking - an institution which explicitly absorbed the discourse of dignity in order to counterbalance “nihilism.” 28 See, for example, the essay by Ingo Berensmeyer in this volume; see also W.J.T. 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