"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point,
they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they
lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of
experience. The lady who only read books that improved her mind was taking
a safe course--and a hopeless one. She'll never know whether her mind is
improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel,
she'll know might well that something is happening to her." -- Flannery O'
Connor
While I have so far found many things that I haven't thought thoroughly enough about to say that I agree with, Mystery and Manners has yet to say anything that my sense of writing finds repugnant... O'Connor has already said many things which contradict my beliefs about the Writer and the writing process but she says it with such brilliancy I am finding it extremely difficult to argue with her. Almost immediately as soon as I read her chapter on "The Grotesque in Souther Fiction" I was beginning to like realism as a literary genre, but not just as a genre but as a writer's philosophy. Perhaps this all requires much more thought than I have given it but before I end this post I should at least say that the realism which the modern world praises is not the realism that O'Connor believes in. It is all a matter of seeing.
Another thing she does well is show how the writer of the grotesque and morbid can be the most Christian of artist; something which will be a very interesting subject matter in a future post.
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