I don’t know if high schools still teach Flannery O’Connor. I’m not entirely clear if we even teach American literature to college students anymore if I’m honest.
Reading literature for enjoyment seems to have been reduced to mostly pornography, but I suppose that’s what they said about D. H. Lawrence a hundred years ago so maybe I shouldn’t judge.
Why else would we read fiction if not for the vitality? And what goes from fiction to literature is a reflection of its time.
What it means to be alive, and experiencing the consequences of one’s actions, can feel pornographic if the subject is genuinely exposed. I’m not so sure the explicit and the erotic are any worse a subject than the base and the broken.
That is my awkward segue into the stroke of good luck which introduced me to French existentialism and Southern Gothic literature in the same year as a teenager.
Reading Albert Camus and Flannery O’Connor roughly contemporaneously stood me in relatively good stead throughout the years as to assessing how little we deserve grace in this truly absurd world. Great horrors in a Christian world are hard tests of faith.
As an aside, it’s funny how we ask about her racism and but I doubt an American would have a nuanced view of pied-noir authors in the French pantheon, but I’m not here to decolonize anyone. Have a hazelnut.
Human frailty is my point, and we justify a lot under that sad reality, even as it’s simply true we are all committing a litany of sin by existing.
Literature explores the quiet horrors that we are damaged people in a broken world. That is why we read literature in the first place.
If not for our search for our humanity, we may as well be consuming information via a machine synopsis of a bloated airport book. Thank goodness information pornography is rapidly becoming ever more déclassé than reading romantasy. Malcolm Gladwell may struggle with that one.
I think it’s fine to explore the vitality of human choice and our pragmatic darkness in the safety of fiction. Reality is often much darker. We could all stand to live our lives a little more, even if we are afraid of the shadows our actions cast.
And as part of that effort the first thing I’d drop is spending time on reading book length business explainers. Replace it with short fiction and the life you save may be your own.