At Commonweal, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, a Flannery O'Connor scholar at Fordham, mourns what recently happened at Loyola in Maryland:
A week after the decision by Loyola University Maryland to remove Flannery O’Connor’s name from one of its buildings, the cherry-pickers arrived on the school’s bucolic campus in northeast Baltimore and, letter by letter, the name of one America’s most iconic Catholic writers disappeared from the dormitory that had been known for more than a decade as Flannery O’Connor Hall.The Commonweal article describes in some detail how this came about. In brief:
- Paul Elie wrote an article in The New Yorker which reproduced passages from O'Connor's private writings to try to demonstrate that she didn't meet today's standards of racial wokeness
- A Loyola student who read Elie's article initiated a change.org petition to remove O'Connor's name from the Loyola dorm
- The school's president pulled together a group to decide what to do. They quickly decided not to resist the petitioners' demands
a writer who was sorely tried by her times and by her conscience, who confessed honestly to her sins in her correspondence, and who atoned for her sins by writing anti-racist fiction that exposed the ugliness and horror of racism in the people she lived in the midst of, and in herself.
I'd think that's a story of reflection, atonement and transformation that anyone can identity with - certainly anyone who takes Christian discipleship seriously. It should trouble us that this is too nuanced a narrative for the cancel culture. And it troubles me that the Jesuit president of a Jesuit institution apparently was too caught up in the Zeitgeist to engage in sufficient Christian or academic reflection.
Finally: it says something about these times that for O'Donnell to write a piece like this, critical of a single example of cancel culture, seems like an act of courage. Kudos, too, to Commonweal for printing it.
I thought it was a good article. I've about had it with the cancel hoopla. 2020 is such an angry, sad, joyless, illness-ridden year.
ReplyDeleteMaybe people are so busy with iconoclasm of the past because they feel helpless to do anything about the present. And you're right, it has become an act of courage to go up against the PC nonsense.
I just hate it when people who have never walked three yards in someone else's shoes pronounces a judgment of doom on strangers. This is, of course, what the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was famous for, except instead of cancelling, it airbrushed.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this emulation is coming from the nominal Left should bother all of us except Jim. He can be bothered, obviously, for other reasons.
I'm under no delusion that the Right wouldn't cancel if it were sufficiently organized and wielded sufficient cultural power. Goodness knows, they have before, cf McCarthyism, HUAC, etc.
DeleteTolerance for a breadth of speech and ideas is at the heart of what it means to be American. I think all of us should grieve when this becomes attenuated, from whatever direction.
I should add: the church made a good start toward tolerance during Vatican II. From time to time she reminds herself of this.
DeleteAnd the Catholic church in the US has been victimized by intolerance during virtually all of its history (certainly not excluding today). I expect church leaders to be sensitive to this.
Flannery O'Connor is not an easy writer. If you don't understand her Catholicism, most of her stories are opaque--and even then she's a slog. She is not an author who becomes "beloved" in the way of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, JD Salinger, or William Faulkner, whose works also had a strong sense of place identity. Moreover, O'Connor's stories were often freak shows. Hazel Motes in "Wiseblood" is a nutter and Grandma in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is nearly unlamentable.
ReplyDeleteApparently, O'Connor didn't care for James Baldwin, whose writing is enjoying a resurgence of interest, especially in the queer community, and she declined to meet with him at her home in Georgia, though she said she would be willing to meet with him in New York. This incident is making the rounds, and people seem to want to construe that in the worst light.
Last year, Georgetown University, another Catholic college, was discovered to have sold slaves. Given the bad press the college received, it seems possible that other Catholic institutions would want to err on the side of woke-ness in reviewing the names and faces they put on display.
The overarching theme of O'Connor's work is that we are all sinners--spectacularly so--and that that makes grace the more profound. She certainly included herself among the sinners. So it is ironic and maddening that events now conspire to erase the memory of a woman who possessed what the PC crowd claims to value so much: a contrite heart.
Well, this makes me feel a bit better,Jean. I tried to get through even one Flannery O'Connor multiple times and then gave up. She simply doesn't "speak" to me. Glad to know that I am not alone. I'll take your word for it as far as the value of her work is concerned. Finally gave up and donated the books to the friends of the library.
DeleteI started with her letters and short stories, then moved on to novellas and novels.
DeleteShe has more currency with traditional Catholics with a conservative bent, possibly because they see everyone who is not churched-up as hellbound maniacs, and O'Connor validates that in spades.
She is more spleen than heart. A little of her goes a long way, but I think she also offers fairly good return for the effort.
The most imposing building at Georgetown is Healy Hall, with a spire that can be seen a long way away. It is named for Fr. Patrick Healy, SJ.,who rebuilt Georgetown after the civil war ended. He was biracial - the son of a slave. His father would have married his mother but it was illegal. She was mostly white also, but the law said that any black blood made someone legally black. He self-identified as white and looked white. His father gave his sons excellent educations. But they were the sons of a woman born into slavery. He was also legally a slave at birth. His brother became the Bishop of Portland Maine. He had sisters who became nuns.
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Francis_Healy
https://tinyurl.com/y3dlg22n
This article by Jonathan Rauch makes helpful distinctions between a critical culture (good) and a cancel culture (bad). Based on these criteria, the "canceling" of O'Connor at Loyola MD, while perhaps grievous, doesn't score highly on my personal outrage-o-meter. If a mob forms to go after O'Donnell and other defenders of O'Connor and her work, we can be sure that cancel culture is in full, toxic bloom.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.persuasion.community/p/the-cancel-culture-checklist-c63
H/t to Andrew Sullivan for the Jonathan Rauch article.
DeleteThanks for that link, Jim. Good list of crieria.
DeleteShould be "criteria".
DeleteI think erasing dead historical figures (what Loyola contributed to with O'Connor) is different from silencing public figures now (what has happened with Milos Yiannopoulous on college campuses). Rauch seems to be talking about the latter.
DeleteCollege dorms should only be named after perfect people. There are plenty of them walking around, by their own accounts. Perhaps a Kirsten Gillebrand Dormitory.
DeleteI think that Flannery O'Connor, with her eye for the comic, would have found it hilarious that they named the thing after her in the first place.
They may Fahrenheit 511 her books, too, but I have mine. What's next? Shakespeare was antisemitic? Get the bastard.
Perfect people? Hot damn, they'll be naming one after me any day now!
DeleteJean, you have an eye for the comic. Your church ladies would fit right in in an O'Connor story. I think they actually did in some form.
Delete