Word: conner
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THERE IS a real sadness in recognizing an utter master whose work finally disappoints. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Conner, a collection of 31 stories of which 12 were heretofore uncollected, leaves one with the same taste as a series of Henry James novels--panting, egged on, and unassuaged. The vision is too heavily weighted with dogma, and that vision too consistently capitulates to writerly control...
...said of a story than that it hints at a heart that could swell to fill a novel, but that it has the delicacy and the tease to contain itself as a story. There is none of the relief of such an overflow in the stories of Flannery O'Conner. The heart of her stories purrs so uniformly that one suspects it is only a machine. One lifts the hood to marvel at the mechanism. Uniform excellence, uniform inspiration. The result is that her stories differ one from the other as much as a Chrysler, Ford or Chevy differ...
Flannery O'Conner brings us to a new South. It is a post-apocalyptic South, an unhallowed land stretching itself somewhere after the departure from the Garden, the death of Christ, the Northern triumph in the Civil War, and the suicide of Faulkner's Quentin Compson. Her Southerners are the bewildered emancipees, the tight-lipped orphans of an erotic, innocent past. They are nothing but sinners. Where Faulkner's characters are sinners, the eroticism of their South, its very sound and fury, is their redemption. But Flannery O'Conner's characters are arrested in the thicket of their psychological-situational...
Flannery O'Conner's characters are pussy, scruffy, and deformed--outwardly the manifestation of their inner selves. In the circumspect way in which she enters the minds of her characters, she reveals in their small-heartedness and small-mindedness, the disease of mental and spiritual sin. In "The Geranium" and "The Last Judgment" old age is Dudley's leprosy; in "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" it is Lucynell Crater's retarded, overweight daughter; in "Everything that Rises Must Converge" it is Julian's mother's bigotry; in "The Lame Shall Enter First" it is Rufus Johnson...
...Fact and fantasy keep coalescing." Mailer admits that he is not the first to have made such an assault on tradition. Although the names of Buñuel, Dreyer and Antonioni are evoked in Maidstone, Mailer believes that his strongest single influence was the San Francisco film maker Bruce Conner, whose dazzling short works (A Movie, Cosmic Ray and Report) constantly explore and test the limits of illusion...