Doubt Your Idols
Flannery O'Connor was always my most LITERATY famous. I felt she was more literary than others, because I never truly 100% undertstood everything I read, and it was respected by academia. She seemed to be on the margins of what women were supposed to write. This week, in the New Yorker:
The context arguments go like this. O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of “the culture that had produced her.” Forced by illness to return to Georgia, she was made captive to a “Southern code of manners” that maintained whites’ superiority over blacks, but her fiction subjects the code to scrutiny. Although she used racial epithets carelessly in her correspondence, she dealt with race courageously in the fiction, depicting white characters pitilessly and creating upstanding black characters who “retain an inviolable privacy.” And she was admirably leery of cultural appropriation. “I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro,” she told an interviewer—a reluctance that Alice Walker lauded in a 1975 essay.
But then, in her personal correspondence:
My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If [James] Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.
One cannot chalk this up to her being a culture of her time. This is an active, cultivated opinion. Fiction writers are meant to think of worlds that can be anything, specifically one that is anti-racist, so there is no excuse for this.
What do we do with artists that we formerly like that are racist? Well, not give them anymore business, but I believe you can still make the art that meant something still mean something.
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What to look forward to:
Academia shenanigans
More Showgirls, the novelization
Recommendations of culture to consume at home
Various recaps
Possibly some fiction…?