> Where does Flannery explore the connection between sentimentality and
> >pornography? Generally in her stories or is there something specific
where
> >she talks about it?
> >
> >Thanks, Renee
>
> It's in one of the essays in _Mystery and Manners_. Wish I could be more
> specific, but I'm beat and can't bring myself to grab the book. I just
> walked in from a conference on volunteerism which was, by the way, short
on
> pornography but long on sentimentality.
[ted atkinson]
I cannot find the specific reference Ted mentions, but there is one that
seems to me right on to the subject raised....and at the same time shows a
keen sense of authorial craft and religious insight....
'Thomas Mann has said the grotesque is the truly anti-bourgeois style, but I
believe that in this country, the general reader has managed to connect the
groutesque with the sentimental, for whenever he speaks of it favorably, he
seems to associate it with the writer's compassion...The hazy kind of
compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be
anti-anything...
'...our present grotesque characters...seem to carry an invisible burden;
their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I believe that
they come about from the prophetic vision peculiar to any novelist whose
concerns I have been describing. In the novelist's case, prophecy is a
matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of
seeing far things close up. The prophet is the realist of distances, and it
is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the
grotesque." pp 43-44 Mystery and Manners