Flannery O’Connor, quoted by SDS (from others) and described, accurately, as “Mills-bait.” That someone as deeply religious as O’Connor recognized that the religious impulse does not illuminate “concrete reality” is remarkable; it almost seems to suggest another Gouldian magisterium: religion, science, art. Perhaps not.
In any event: what is beautiful about her assertion is not just that it accurately explains why those full of passionate conviction -religious or political, it should be stressed, if Socialist Realism and its ilk hadn’t made it clear how similar such forms of belief are in their effect on creativity (and otherwise, for that matter)- make bad art. More significant is her ingenious explanation of why. She doesn’t denigrate religion or suggest that it is not epistemologically valid, only that we “cannot approach the infinite directly [and] must penetrate the natural human world as it is.”
It is interesting that there seems to be a fundamental incompatibility between belief systems of any sort and the art of the novel. In the case of political ideas, which ruin novels as reliably as anything else, and ruin novelists too, it suggests that the realism of the novel -its penetration of “concrete reality”- yet exceeds any ideology, even those you and I consider axiomatic. Hence: the mysterious power of transgressive novels to exist beyond political and moral judgement.
Perhaps it is just that the author is concerned with what the world is, while religious thought attends to what the world’s ostensible essence beneath or beyond appearances is and political thought is concerned with what “should” be.
(via mills)
or possibly, the elect understand that the story (the meta-narrative) isn’t theirs.
