The texts of his lectures on writing are essential. In Italy have been published in Theoria in 1997 in the book "The devil's territory "which, unfortunately, and 'impossible to find. I sent you via e-mail excerpts in addition to the story" a good man and' hard to find, what I read on Tuesday, so to speak.
Here is an article by Enzo Siciliano to learn a bit more '...
WORLD Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor suffered from lupus devastating. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia in 1964 killed a tumor, which his body could not react in any way, weakened as it was for the care that the lupus had sought for years. He lived on a farm near Milledgeville. Bred peacocks: quell'allevamento filled the part of working life that she could play.
was strongly Catholic and believer. He had to tell stories of fate that the South who knew the intimate nature of the heart. Wise Blood ( The wisdom of the blood), published in 1952, was the novel that gave her success and fame: at the same time, his life turned into a final ordeal. The large doses of cortisone he needed to fight and curb her badly corrosero the physical. The use of crutches was the first step toward more raw impediments.
But the life of Flannery O'Connor did not take place in a dark waiting for death. Manzoni was right: the Christian faith is a force that not only the body to resist evil, but overcome evil with consequent moral certainty of rebirth. What then is the spring of life and ways to revive may be multiple, but when they believed that there is no dynamic foil hostile to them.
start with the peacocks. Why Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks? He could not answer herself: "I do not know," he wrote. Bred chickens as a child. He had five years and one of his chicken, "a brown bantam Cochin China, had the distinction of being able to walk both forwards and backwards." He went to a photographer to film the Pathé News. The poor chicken "shortly after he died, not surprisingly."
Flannery O'Connor was equipped with a strong comic. But before the peacocks confessed that he can to keep that "in a reverent awe." In a letter to a friend, the anonymous A. of the correspondence, November 25th of '55 wrote: "Where there is a peacock is also a map of the universe."
and to stand for letters. Novels by O'Connor's Wise Blood (remember I hope I get a beautiful film that John Huston) are two. The rest of his works are short stories, always beautiful (Attilio Bertolucci be read and reread: are all translated in Italian). Then there are a few of her lectures, essays, also well translated into Italian by Ottavio Fatigue in the territory of the devil. Today, more and Fatigue has edited an anthology of the letters to Einaudi ( Sola to guard the fortress , pp. XX170, pounds 18,000), deriving from a much wider choice made in the database by Sally Fitzgerald, wife of the critic Robert, good friends both of Flannery, The Habit of Being , and printed in 1979 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Letters of Flannery O'Connor are among the most unique, Drug texts of American literature of the century.
When Fitzgerald took her hands, which had been his correspondent wrote to Robert Giroux, the publisher, that what struck her and caught leafing through the papers was a direct, incisive with which " uncontrollable life "by Flannery stood out there: there stood out vividly his probe into the minds of others, as well as its sound, its evil, its destiny, its hard being in the world, but not ruthlessly ruthlessly .
There was no way that Flannery is detached from its nail: the map of the universe looked everywhere, as in the color tablets that dissolve the long tail feathers of a male peacock.
The strong realism in fiction of O'Connor has its roots in that south in Faulkner had his Aeschylus. In her, the tragedy is exchanged constantly in comedy.
Also his dear A. September 24 of '55 wrote about Simone Weil: "His life is an almost perfect blend of comedy and terrible, then if we are two sides of same coin. In my experience, every funny thing I've written is more terrible than fun, fun or just because terrible, terrible or just because of fun. Well, the life of Simone Weil is the comic who has ever read and the more genuinely tragic and terrible. If I live enough to fully develop my skills as an artist, I like to write a comic novel about a woman, and what is more terrible than an intellectual comedian and proud and sharp that you draw near to God with his teeth a little step at a time gnashing? I have to get on my two legs of aluminum. "
The quote is long, I know, but it is a striking portrait, stripped to the conclusion, in anger, in the smile and scorn toward those in the "two aluminum legs."
If Faulkner, with his novels, was the Aeschylus (And a bit 'on Sophocles) of the southern States, O'Connor it was the Euripides. Believes in the law and the dramatic life that is lived in those lands, but we believe on the edge of a caustic wit, subversive that everything would shell, then if there was a precipice into the heart, the presence of God (the deus ex machina ) who saves everything and saves her beatification, consoling, but saves it as a tragedy, you can save, through murder and death.
A John Hawkes on September 13, '59 writes: "My theme is always the conflict between the attraction of the sacred and a disbelief in him that you breathe the air of the times. Believing is always difficult, but much more so is today. "
The visionary protagonist of Wise Blood running from village to village preaching while around him there is not that bad, and he himself is evil. But what matters for its author's credibility is, in the paradox of the man who professes faith. "The problem is not whether something is positive or negative, as if it is credible" (with A., September 8, '56).
conclude with the faith of Flannery O'Connor. I am a bit 'Jansenist, he said. I think that for some Italian Catholic clarity of his words may sound surprising and annoying ("To live today breathe nihilism. Inside and outside the Church is the gas that you breathe ', A. 28 in a letter of August '55). Also claimed to be "a Catholic individually equipped with modern consciousness, the kind that Jung called ahistorical, lonely and guilty." He added that this was the burden she had to take, you and every Catholic be aware of: "Hearing in the contemporary extreme measure." And again: "This is a generation of wingless chickens, and I believe that Nietzsche was referring to the same thing by saying that God is dead" (again to A. In a letter dated 20 July '55). All this could affect
as art, literature? Flannery O'Connor writes to Eileen Hall, 10 March '56: "Art is not something to be seen" between "people, but not the art of the novel. It 'something that you live alone and in order to grasp a new way, through the senses, the mystery of existence. The mystery of existence is largely a sin. "
The science of Flannery O'Connor supported the sin was known to the smallest detail. For this Euripides suffered the same fate could tell, and represent the explosion "comic and terrible 'will to the many conflicts in the same individual.
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(From La Repubblica, May 25, 2001 )
Happy reading, hello Floriana:)
