angelic artist in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, The

Renascence, Fall 2000 by O'Gorman, Farrell

The opposition here is between Christ, Who stands for reality in all its definiteness, and Apollo, who stands for the indefinite, the romantic, the endless. It is again the opposition between the Hebraic imagination, always concrete, and the agnostic imagination, which is dream-like.2

While the work of Maritain and Lynch provided O'Connor and Percy with some theoretical notion of the Catholic literary imagination, both found more practical support for such a vision in the formalist critical sensibilities of the Tates. Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon were, of course, practicing writers as well as critics, and Gordon's advice to O'Connor and Percy upon reading their early manuscripts was much more immediate and technical than the ideas conveyed by Maritain and Lynch. But though their attention was much more directly focused on the actual practice of literary creation and criticism, Gordon and her husband alike were ultimately, of course, in agreement with the notions advanced in Art and Scholasticism and Christ and Apollo. Tate drew on Maritain throughout his mature career in developing his sophisticated articulation of an implicitly sacramental aesthetic; he and Gordon, as befitted their own modernist and New Critical sensibilities, also attempted to convey to the younger authors both a deep sense of symbolic realism and a reverence for formal technique, in part by disparaging writers who succumbed to what Lynch would have deemed the "Apollonian" imagination.

Indeed, the Catholic intellectual tradition that fostered the imaginations of O'Connor and Percy often most articulately conveyed what it was by pointing to what it was not. In their common intellectual milieu O'Connor and Percy found not only positive support for their own sort of realism but also injunctions against certain forms of the modem literary imagination. Because Tate had for so long been troubled by his own relationship to that imagination, he was one of the most powerful spokesmen on its shortcomings, particularly when it manifested itself in the form of romanticism; O'Connor and especially Percy would follow his lead in linking romanticism with the modern tendency toward "dream-like" abstraction under Maritain's general rubric of "angelism." The realism that each embraced in this particular milieu, I will argue, accounts for the antiromantic bias both show in their relentless satire of flawed artists in their own fiction-almost inevitably types of the romantic who, ironically, often perceive themselves as politically topical realists.

Tate's essays are a fitting starting point for further understanding what he, Gordon, and ultimately O'Connor and Percy saw as the limitations of the twentieth-century romantic imagination. In "Yeats's Romanticism," Tate (who finally refuses to call Yeats a romantic) echoes T. S. Eliot in succinctly phrasing the "historic" problem of romanticism as "the division between sensibility and intellect" (Essays of Four Decades 300). While Tate wrote a number of pieces on this theme, "Hart Crane" (1932-37) emerged from his early experience and encapsulates his attitudes toward what he would later call the role of "the man of letters in the modern world." This essay reflects the essence of Tate's larger thinking about art, culture, and religion in the twentieth century; furthermore, it was not only admired in itself by O'Connor, but also contains the seeds of much of Tate's later thought on the literary imagination.'