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Good evening. My name is Stanley R. Hall. I'm a member of the faculty of the seminary, and it is my privilege to welcome you here this evening to the second of the Westerfeld lectures for the year 2000.

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We will leave undecided whether this is the first or the last year. I believe I disagree with the president. What is more important to give thanks to God for this gathering and this occasion.

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Our evening hymn is number 546 in the Presbyterian Hymnal. Please be seated. On behalf of the President and the seminary community, I invite and remind you of the reception immediately following tonight's lecture in the McCord Center. Well, a good speaker is hard to find.

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We are proud as well as grateful to welcome, to host, and to offer to you Ralph C. Wood, the Westerfeld lecturer for the year 2000 for tonight's second lecture, The Necessity of Satire in Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor. Professor Wood, we are eager to hear you once more. It's my privilege once again as a Baptist to address a Presbyterian audience.

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One of my Presbyterian friends was asking me recently why it is that so many Baptists become Presbyterians. And I explained that the answer is really quite simple because they want to be able to drink in front of each other. He replied, Yes, that explains why when I go fishing, I always take two Baptists with me, because if I take only one, he drinks up all my beer.

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I also heard about a conversation between a Presbyterian lady and her Baptist neighbor over whether Jesus drank alcohol. The Baptist lady was, of course, quite convinced that he didn't. And the Presbyterian lady pointed out that wine was the iced tea, of course, of the ancient Near East, and that it wasn't Welch's grape juice that Jesus drank. It was unfermented, would have been poisonous very quickly in that kind of atmosphere.

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But after all, our Lord's very first miracle was the miracle of wine at the wedding in Cana in Galilee. And just kept pressing her case more and more, and finally the Baptist lady said, You know, I have to concede I guess our Lord did drink wine. But I would have thought a great deal more of him if he hadn't.

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So we come then to a second literary way of reflecting the gospel satire. The word comes from the Greek word satyr, that hominoid creature that also has animal characteristics, usually horns and hooves. The satyr plays from which our word satire comes, were tagged on to the end of the Greek tragedies.

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So that after a week-long festival in Athens of works by Aeschylus, Euripides, and so forth, you'd have a satire, a satyr play, that mocked, in a kind of comic romp, all of the heavy, tragic seriousness that had preceded, kind of deflating all of that, bringing it back to the human level. So satire is a species of comedy, then, that seeks to evoke laughter when the gap between human pretension and human performance becomes pronounced. If, for example, a haughty person prancing down the street slips upon a banana peel, we laugh.

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If A crippled or homeless person did so, we would weep. Satire, then, is an ironizing genre, a mode of imagination that enables us to stand at a critical distance from ourselves. and from the world. And therefore, it helps us to laugh at ourselves and to laugh at others, for thinking too highly of ourselves, for believing that we are sufficient to ourselves, for being proud and pretentious and puffed up.

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Sapphire is a needling sort of wit that punctures ballooned egos and inflated reputations. Dante, in the Middle Ages, linked such laughter to religion by calling it buona era, good wrath. Because it's the kind of laughter that refuses to give what some of my pastoral care friends call the redemptive grunt of approval, uh-huh, uh-huh, to what are actually outrageous, committed against both God and humanity.

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As you know, the Roman playwright Terence very famously claimed that I am human, and nothing human is alien to me. Flannery O'Connor made what I think is the perfect Christian retort to that. She said, Plenty of things human are alien to me.

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Chief, of course, her own sin. The problem with satire, of course, is it can turn mean and vindictive. It can become a vehicle for evisceration and incineration. It can become a wounding rapier sort of wit.

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The world's great satirists are therefore often mordant and splenetic souls, from Moliere to Swift, from Ambrose Bierce and Dorothy Parker to H.L. Mencken. You may know Swift's own self-composed epitaph on his grave at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

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It reads, He lies where furious indignation can no longer rend his heart. That's his own epitaph. Dorothy Parker, approached by her doctor and told that if she didn't stop her drinking and smoking, she would be dead in two months, answered, Surely no such hope.

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It's dark, very dark kind of laughter. Baudelaire famously said that holy books never laugh, no matter what religion they come from. Well, the Bible does laugh. It enables us to laugh at ourselves by replacing a self-justifying and critical accusatory laughter with a joyful and self-critical laughter.

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It's present in Amos, other prophets, most notably it seems to me Elijah, whom, as you know, taking on the boosters of Baal, accuses their god of having gone on a journey as musing away the time Perhaps dozing off, and Elijah suggests maybe he's even turned aside to take a leak. In the psalmist, we find the psalmist crying out, Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? Do I not despise them that despise thee?

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God Himself is depicted as sitting on His throne and laughing, beholding them, says the psalmist, in derision, laughing folly to scorn. Job is not without laughter. The darkest book in the Bible is also a very funny book. One of the funniest passages surely is at the end when Job is taken on a tour of the universe by the Lord God and asks very witty questions about Leviathan and Behemoth and about laying the foundations of the cosmos and asking where Job was when those things happened.

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As reminders, I think, that God has other business than human happiness. and that Job's terrible suffering must be seen thus in a cosmic context. Our Lord himself, I think, indulged in satire, especially in his parables. My favorite, what I think surely is a satirical passage, is when he's asked the question about rendering unto Caesar and tells him to go catch a fish.

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And if they'll fetch a coin out of that fish's mouth, they get their answer. I think there's a good deal of ragging going on there. So satire is a venerable genre within both the ancient classical world, but also, I want to argue tonight, in the modern Christian world.

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But looking at 2, to me, very powerful Christian satirists, Walker Percy on the one hand, and Flannery O'Connor on the other. You may know that Walker Percy was a Catholic convert. He came to his Catholicism at considerable cost. You may know Jay Tolson's very fine book called Pilgrim in the Ruins that recounts Percy's passage into Catholicism very, very convincingly and powerfully.

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The best of Percy's work, I think, is the funniest at least, is his novel Love in the Ruins. It dates from 1971. It's a book that my wife forbids me to read after midnight because I wake her up tackling with my own laughter. Percy often said, I can't write unless I'm angry.

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No wonder he was so prolific. He was often angry because he believed that we live in a time of unprecedented spiritual deadness and inertia, and that the frenetic activity of our lives are but huge signs of hidden spiritual malaise. Percy says, Our great fear is not that the bomb will fall, but that the bomb won't fall.

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And therefore, we'll still be faced with the problem of how to get past 4 o'clock on Monday afternoon. That's our real problem. So let's encounter, then, Percy's own satirical description of a blighted, wasted cultural deadland such as America has become in his novel of 1971, Love in the Ruins. It's a futuristic novel.

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It's set in the What was then the not-too-distant future of 1984, he's trying to turn upside down Orwell's novel, as you know, with that title that had been written in 1948. First of all, Percy depicts a blighted landscape. Wolves have begun to howl in the streets of Cleveland.

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Vines cover the whole interstate system. Buzzards circle overhead looking for carrion. Gas-guzzling automobiles molder in parking lots with vapor locks that no one can fix. In a very famous passage from Love in the Ruins, he says, America is not dying because of the influence of Nietzsche and Marx.

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America is dying for want of repairmen. He describes this as a country where you can buy anything and get nothing fixed. Clearly, Percy's attempt to describe our nation, our civilization, as returning to what Hobbes called the state of nature, where life, as you know, is nasty, brutish, and short. Even the signs of prosperity for Percy are quite alarming.

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He's especially troubled by the new prominence of the Airstream trailer. He calls it the Conestoga wagon of the late 20th century. He says when Americans get fed up and want to strike out for the territories, they get in their Airstream trailers and travel across the entire country to meet up with other Airstream trailer owners to talk about their Airstream trailers. O'Connor has a similar kind of satire of the automobile.

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Percy calls this, by the way, the old auto age he sees very rapidly passing. In her first novel, Wise Blood, the central character named Hazel Motes has made his car his home, his pulpit, and not least of all, his deity. He sleeps in it, he preaches on top of it, and he worships it. In a very famous line, he says, Nobody with a good car needs to be justified by Jesus.

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When I see my Baylor students stroking their Lexus or their Volvo, I think they also agree. Percy also depicts a very deeply divided religious scene in America. All the churches have split into warring factions. He sees the schisms that are just around the corner, I'm afraid, in all of our denominations.

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I saw this nearly 30 years ago. For example, the Catholic Church has split. on the right into the ACC, the American Catholic Church, which has established its headquarters in Cicero, Illinois, the home of Al Capone, some of you know. The highest Sunday of the year is Property Rights Sunday, and it's the logo of the American Catholic Church is, you know, the old Sears All-State ad of the little white, perfect white home with the white picket pits around it.

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That's the logo of the American Catholic Church. At the holiest moment when the priest elevates the host, the congregation rises and sings the Star-Spangled Banner. Things are no better on the left, however, where a kind of relevant religion has triumphed, where Thomas Moore says, this is rather irreverent, you have to pardon me, ass-twisting, guitar-strumming nuns who don't recognize how much better they look in habits than in JCPenney pantsuits. have taken over, where ex-priests now run sex clinics.

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One of them actually operates a vaginal computer console to measure orgasms. And the chief debate on the left, the Catholic left, is the right of priests to remarry after divorce. The old mainline Protestants are almost extinct. They devote themselves to such noble causes as the recognition of Castro as legitimate ruler of Cuba, and of defending necrophilia as an authentic sexual expression since no victim is involved.

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On the Protestant right, however, things are just as bad. The evangelicals are peddling the gospel of health, wealth, and happiness by sponsoring junior high dance teams called the Christian Cadets, and by holding golf tournaments at night under the new high-voltage arc lights, night golf in America, and promoting those golf tournaments, George Beverly Shea Jr. promotes them with their new promotional jingle, Jesus Christ, the Greatest Pro of Them All.

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I thought that was sacrilegious enough until a student told me last week he actually saw a poster that had the cross with a note pinned to it that read, Gone to see Dad. Be back soon. We're preparing a place for you. The political world that Percy describes in this novel is even more paranoid.

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The Democrats have renamed themselves the Left Papasani Party (L-E-F-T-P-A-P-A-S-A-N-E), which is an acronym for their most sacred beliefs: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, and Euthanasia. Yet the only political accomplishment the left, they've shortened it to left, have made is to have stricken in God we trust from pennies. Republicans, in turn, have renamed themselves the Knothead Party. Sorry.

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And their motto is, no man can be too knot-headed in the service of his country. That echoes some of you know of Barry Goldwater's 1964 Cow Palace speech. The Knotheads hold their meeting in Montgomery. founding city of the Confederacy, of course.

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But their only political accomplishment is to have succeeded in mandating prayers in the now all-black public schools, as well as distributing birth control pills in Africa, Asia, and Alabama. In this novel, which is set in a New Orleans suburb, the local membership of the Knot Heads consists largely of Bob Jones University graduates, ex-Washington, D.C. policemen, passed over Navy commanders, officials of the National Rifle Association, patriotic chiropractors, and, sorry, sorry, I can't hear.

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And Christian proctologists. Percy says the science of the future is proctology. He says no longer is the eye a window under the soul, but the colon. He says, he has more say, no wonder that constipation is the conservative complaint.

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Conservatives can't let go of anything. Liberals all afflicted with diarrhea, they can't hold on to anything. So it is a country now that he calls the divide. United States of America.

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And yet the final divisions that rip this country to shreds are not racial or ethnic or religious, but rather entirely opposing cultures. There are therefore left television networks and knothead networks. There are left movies. One of the favorite left movies is called Homo Hijinks, where filatio is performed in mid-air by two parachutists.

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The favorite knothead movies are The Sound of Music. Sorry. Flubber and Ice Capades, 1981. Clean movies all.

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What Percy saw, of course, was the coming of the culture wars, more than 20 years in advance. But he interprets them with absolute freshness of vision. For what he sees remarkably, is that left and right are mirror images of each other, twins without knowing it, each accepting the negative definition laid on it by the other, both having cut themselves off from any transcendent critique or correction.

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I tell my students the only thing worse than a fundamentalist is an anti-fundamentalist. For an anti-fundamentalist is let the fundamentalist set the terms of the debate. In Percy's world, this novel, everyone is dead, dead, dead, as he puts it. Because we've all embraced the reductive definition of ourselves as organisms existing within a habitat, adapting and adjusting to that habitat, seeking to satisfy our needs and drives and desires, just like those of any other anthropoid, only at a slightly higher level.

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On the right, a consumerist individualism has triumphed. On the left, a civil liberties individualism has triumphed. Both are twin forms of a deadly individualism. In this suburb where the action takes place called Paradise Estates, liberals and conservatives live happily side by side in this same enclave.

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The only noticeable difference between them is that the lefts require the black maids to ride in the front seat. Percy's point made later in his novel called The Thanatos Syndrome, one that will offend many, is that an America governed by Pat Robertson and the Christian coalition would be no more oppressive than an America governed by Norman Lear. and people for the American way. Again, there not being a dime's worth of difference between them.

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What then to do about this? What is Percy's prescription about this American sickness unto death when the stock market keeps climbing and oil seems to be well? The central figure, of course, is this man named Tom Moore, Dr. Tom Moore.

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a lineal descendant of Sir St. Thomas More. He is what he calls a confessed bad Catholic. He is a man who drinks too much.

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He's a man who carouses. He's a man who has not one woman, but three holed up at the local motel. He's worried about the riven American soul and how it might be welded whole again. He's also a medical doctor, a neurologist.

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And so he's invented an instrument for the healing of the American soul. It's called the lapsometer. He takes it, of course, from the Latin word lapsus, meaning fall. Because by means of this lapsometer, he's come to measure the distance between the rightful integrity of body and soul that we're supposed to have as we fall off into one kind of error or the other.

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On the left, the liberals fall off into what he calls angelism. They orbit the earth. On the right, the conservatives fall off into bestialism. They're filled with rage that somebody might be about to get their money or their property.

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And so in this wonderful and terrible machine called the lapsometer, he has learned to apply electronic stimuli to certain areas of the brain. I should add, by the way, Percy had a medical degree. from Columbia in pathology. So he's a very careful scientist and knows what he's talking about.

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He applies these electronic stimuli to certain areas of the brain so as, for example, to enable these beast-like right-wingers to abandon their rage and to lay hold of a greater sense of liberality and charity. On the other hand, he can stimulate a different area of the brain than the angelic liberals to help them get out of the stratosphere, of these ideal and unrealizable possibilities into contact with the everyday realities of the mundane world. And yet the real drama and poignancy of the novel is Moore's gradual awakening to the fact that there could be

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nothing worse than to heal the riven American soul by this artificial means. That to cure the broken human condition mechanically would constitute an erzot salvation via brain stimulation that would be nothing less than demonic. We discussed this this afternoon in our 3:30 session. What Moore does in this, Percy does in this novel is have the devil appear.

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He appears as a government funding agent, wanting to get patent rights on this lapsometer. So with the use of it, he could, of course, cure all Americans by means of it. It's not until he routs this figure whose name is Art Immelman, As you know, the German word Himmel means heaven.

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He's lucifer, he's fallen from Himmel, from heaven. Does he come to the truth about the matter? And the truth about the matter is the one we heard this morning from Dr. Nelson.

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And that is that anxiety is endemic to the human condition. To be rid of it means we would be subhuman. To be totally at home in the world, adjusted to the world, would mean we would no longer be human at all, but be animals. W.H.

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Ogden famously said that we humans are the only creatures who both smoke and laugh. And so he gradually comes to see that the real problem is not the left, the idiot left, and not the right, the idiot right. The real problem is with Thomas More himself, who suffers, by the way, from both complaints. He's both a liberal and a conservative, which means he's on his way, perhaps, to wholeness.

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One of the moments of greatest awakening comes when he remembers the death of his daughter, Samantha. Samantha was a girl who had a neuroblastoma, one of the most disfiguring forms of brain cancer. It was a cancer that was so horrible it pushed out one of her eyeballs so that the eyeball stood out from the side of her head. It was when that daughter fell ill with neuroblastoma that Moore and his wife divorced, it so often happens.

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And in a long later remembered conversation between Moore and his daughter Samantha, he recalls their discussion about why they would not go to Lourdes to seek the cure there, miraculously. Moore, undergoing a kind of catechism by his own daughter, said, I came to realize that the reason I didn't want Samantha to go to Lourdes was that I was afraid she might be cured. But what do you do, he says, when God grants you a miracle?

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He said, I look forward in a strange way to my daughter's death, because I knew as soon as she died, sweet grief would come pouring in. And I would now have justification for the rest of my life for the kind of decadent, whoring, drinking life I wanted to live. I did not want Samantha to be healed. For her to be healed would mean for me to have lived a transformed life.

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He comes to live that transformed life at the end of the novel, this should interest you as Presbyterians, largely through his love for a lapsed Presbyterian woman named Ellen Oglethorpe. It's interesting, she's the one woman he has not had sex with, the woman he truly falls in love with. His really revealing meditation about her, and I think the key to the whole novel, comes on the night after he had attempted suicide. Turns out to be a macabre scene when he attempts suicide on Christmas Eve.

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After watching Perry Como sitting on his stool in his cardigan singing Silent Night, he thought that was cause for ultimate despair. So he slit his wrists. He discovers he was happy for the first time in his life in the nuthouse. He said, because there everybody recognizes they're crazy.

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He says, in the real world no one recognizes that they're crazy. One of the best scenes is when he's sitting on the blocky couch there in the suicide ward of the local mental hospital. It's on actually the next day, Christmas Day, when, as you know, the blue-gray game is played, the most useless, worthless of all the post-season football contest. It's played from Mobile, Alabama.

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The TV is completely out of adjustment, the picture's just rolling, rolling. The Christmas tree is decorated with colored Kleenex because, of course, it couldn't have any glass there that somebody might slip their wrist. And one of the inmates lets out what Percy calls a truly Old Testament lamentation. And a great black man says, Ain't it the truth, though?

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Well, He's attended there in that suicide ward by Ellen Oglethorpe, this lapsed Presbyterian nurse. And he, of course, has lust for her at first. He has lust for all women.

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He's a Don Giovanni figure, 1,001 in Spain alone. But then that falls away, and he offers the following meditation that I think is the key to the whole novel. He says, Lust gave way to sorrow. And I prayed, arms stretched out like a Mexican, tears streaming down my face.

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Dear God, I see it now. Why can't I see it at all times, at other times? That it's you I love in the beauty of the world, and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it's pilgrims we are, Wayfarers on a journey, not pigs, nor angels.

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He's obviously Ed Cohen and Pascal's famous thing, neither angel nor beast. So that's Percy's satire of the modern American scene and of its potential cure. Let's turn to Flannery O'Connor then. She's not a convert.

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A lot of people think she is. because her fiction is so fierce. This will date his comment something terribly, but Evelyn Wall, when he read O'Connor's fiction, said this could not have been written by a woman. And of course, it was indeed written by a woman.

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By a woman who died at the age of 39, of lupus arithmetomas, who said, I know I would never be a little old lady in tennis shoes. One of her most poignant last letters, she could write only just a few lines for Pray that the lupus don't finish me off too quick. Finished her off very quick.

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She was just 39. And yet she wrote with an uncommon intensity, knowing that she wouldn't live to be a little old lady in tennis shoes. In fact, she once got a letter from a lady in the California insane asylum. She said if you write even for Bottega Oscure or the Yale Review, you'll get a letter from a little old lady in a California insane asylum.

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who said, I don't know why you Christians take that Jesus figure so seriously. If he had died at age 80 of athlete's foot, nobody would remember him. And O'Coutter replied, lady, you're orthodox without knowing it. It's precisely the brevity and the intensity of his life that really matters.

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He was a hanged man. O'Connor does not satirize the political left and the political right so much as she satirizes atheists on the one hand and Christians on the other. She's a woman who often spoke of the Christ-haunted South. As a Roman Catholic, she said she felt herself deeply privileged to live in the Christ-haunted South.

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She said, while the South is most certainly not Christ-centered, witness our treatment of black people. It is most certainly Christ haunted. It haunts two kinds of figures in her fiction. On the one hand, self-sufficient pagans, and on the other hand, self-sufficient Christians.

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The pagans who have the hell scared out of them are largely figures who are embarrassed by the reality of the holy, who believe that religion is a form of therapy or ethics. that serves at best to bring personal happiness or to uphold social standards, or at worst, that serves to delude us about the fundamental fact that life comes from nowhere, that life goes nowhere, and that thus life has no meaning except what little significance we can create for ourselves and impose on it. The example I cite to you, and of course I could cite many, is figure name Holga Hopewell from her story called Good Country People.

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How many of you know that story out of curiosity? Just see. Half a dozen, 10 of you. One of you told me, in fact it was a student here, told me he'd never read a word of O'Connor.

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I said, I can't imagine a greater treat than what is in store for you to read her for the first time. Her name is not Holga. Originally, her name is Joy. She's a woman of keen intellect.

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She has a PhD from Heidelberg. She reads Heidegger for her pastime leisure reading. She unfortunately has been wounded in a hunting accident, has had a leg shot off, and therefore clumps about on an artificial leg. She also suffers from a heart disease.

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She's so weak, weakened by her illness that she has to live at home. If you know anything about Lanner O'Connor, that's of course of self-portrait. She had to return home from New York City to live in Milledgeville, Georgia, under the care of her mother. Hoga Hopewell's world is a stiflingly small

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minded world. I remember meeting a lady who was the wife of a Baptist pastor who lived in small eastern North Carolina towns and someone asked her, In the Baptist church, if you serve a church for the third year, we make you a pastor emeritus because we move so often. This lady had moved all over eastern North Carolina and someone said, How have you stood it? in these tiny, suffocating little North Carolina towns where nothing ever happens.

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And the pastor's wife said, That's right, but what you hear makes up for it. Well, Hulga has heard an earful. She is daily bombarded with bromide such as, Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, or That's life.

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Or people are different. And of course, she's fed up. She is so angry about the dissonance between her intellectual brilliance and her small-minded, confined, suffocating world that she has entered rebellion against it by renaming herself when she came of age, Hullagop. Flannery O'Connor made her only visit to Texas in 1962 when I was a senior in East Texas State.

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We asked her where she came up with that name. She said, it's a cross between huge and ugly. Holga. Well, she's a very embittered young woman living in this impossible context.

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Let me read you a passage about how her mother sees her. The narrator is inside Mrs. Hopewell's mind. Hogle was brilliant, but she didn't have a grain of sense.

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It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that Hogle every year grew less like other people and more like herself. That's a damning comment. Bloated, rude, and squint-eyed.

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And she said such strange things. To her own mother, she had said, without warning, without excuse, standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full. Woman, do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not?

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God, she had cried, sinking down again and staring at her plate. Maule Branche was right. She's quoting the French 18th century philosopher who mother, of course, never heard of. Maule Branche was right.

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We are not our own light. We are not our own light. Mrs. Hopewell had no idea why he brought that on.

00:41:30.720 - 00:41:57.680

She'd only made the remark, hoping Joy would take it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The girl, this is again her mother, the girl had taken, she's 35 years old, had taken the PhD in philosophy, and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, my daughter is a nurse, or my daughter is a school teacher, or even my daughter is a chemical engineer.

00:41:58.080 - 00:42:28.560

But you could not say, my daughter is a philosopher. That was something that had ended with the Greeks and the Romans. Well, Holga hits upon the idea when she and her family are visited by a Bible salesman named Manly Pointer of seducing, seducing this naive Bible salesman who says he is after all doing Christian service.

00:42:29.360 - 00:42:50.520

At Baylor we know people are really spiritual when they speak, I'm spiritual. He's doing his Christian service. by selling Bibles. And she sees him, of course, as a perfect candidate for conversion to her own nihilism, because she is a believer in nothingness.

00:42:50.520 - 00:43:31.920

She says, I have seen through, I have seen through to the fact that there is nothing. And she decides the best way to seduce Manly Pointer was to get him away from her mother's house, to take him down to the barn, and to accompany him up into the hayloft, where there she will deflower this naive Christian virgin. Well, she's so naive about matter sexual that she puts on Vaseline on her collar, thinking that might make her smell better as they head down to the barn loft.

00:43:34.080 - 00:43:56.080

Here's what we read about her there. Man, the point of reverse is the ordinary order of things. Usually it's the girl who says, you've got to say you love me, to the boy, you've got to say you love me first. Instead, he takes that, you've got to say you love me.

00:43:57.440 - 00:44:12.640

She was always careful how she committed herself. In a sense, she began, if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it's not a word I use. I don't have illusions.

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I'm one of those people who see through to nothing. Well, you poor baby, she murmured, it's just as well you don't understand. And she pulled him by the neck, face down against her. We're all damned, she said.

00:44:31.840 - 00:44:58.320

But some of us have taken off our blindfolds and see that there's nothing to see. It's a kind of salvation. It turns out that Manly Porter is not the virginal Baptist Bible salesman that Hogle thinks he is. For it turns out that the Bible he brings to the hayloft is not the King James, but the hollowed out version.

00:44:58.880 - 00:45:27.840

inside of which is a flask of whiskey, a pack of obscene playing cards, and condoms. He discovers that what Hogle really values is not her own sexuality, but rather her artificial leg. Because he begins to ask her to let him take it off. She thinks, of course, this is the prelude to what would be the seduction scene.

00:45:29.440 - 00:45:46.000

When instead, he, as a penetrating psychiatrist of his own sort, sees that this is what Holgel really values. He therefore does not want her underwear. He wants the artificial leg. He says, I once got a lady's glass eye this way.

00:45:47.360 - 00:46:19.360

He wants to devastate Holgel, and he does by taking off her artificial leg and fleeing from the hayloft with it. Meaning that, of course, her benighted mother will have to come and rescue this girl from the hayloft where she's now stranded, having gone to try to seduce manly pointer there. And the last thing he says to her is the most devastating line in the story. He says, Listen, Holga, let me tell you something.

00:46:21.360 - 00:46:42.600

I've been believing in nothing ever since I was born. She encounters not a Heideggerian nihilist. She encounters an existential cornbread nihilist who has utterly devastated her. And of course, that means she is now, having been robbed of her nihilism, free at last, at least for the potential opening of grace.

00:46:42.600 - 00:46:53.200

That's the way all of O'Connor's stories end. They sometimes end in death, as you know. And a lot of people are put off by the multiple deaths in O'Connor's story. For example, in

00:46:53.600 - 00:47:03.320

Her most famous story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. Six people are killed. But I remind my students of what O'Connor said. She said, a lot of people get killed in my fiction, but nobody gets hurt.

00:47:03.320 - 00:47:09.680

That's exactly right. Nobody's tortured. People go to their deaths, usually pretty graciously.