Reading Burke and O'Connor
So, I have been working on a research project that is connected to my Phd project that finished last year. I must confess, however, that i am getting a bit tired of the academic life after what has been over 7 years of intellectual toil. I know that it is something that I'm good at, and indeed can make a contribution with, but I think basically it is not making me happy. So I'm going to keep on an meet my responsibilities while I try to figure out what I am going to do next.
In the meantime I've been trying to incorporate more creative stuff into my life. That has meant writing, but also reading. And I love reading. I have my parents to thank for this, who are both readers and writers (my Dad is a Professor of American History and my Mum a multi-talented speech and language therapist who has published on allotment gardening, diego rivera and the calumet copper strike of 1903). I think reading only academic work can leave one craving for the emotional reaction one gets from well written fiction.
My go-to writer for a satisfying read is the American crime and mystery novellist James Lee Burke. His Dave Robicheaux novels are consistently absorbing, moving and brilliant, and also very violent, but operate on a mythic plane that transform his characters - cops, mobsters, poor rural people from Louisiana and Montana and Texas - into heroic figures in a medieval romance. He's also not afraid of including supernatural elements, reflecting a deep and mordant spirituality rooted in Burke's own recovery from alcoholism and his Catholicism, traits shared by Robicheaux himself. The most recent book of his I read, 'Light of the World' takes this to new levels with its apocalyptic showdown between Robicheaux and his partner and best friend Clete Purcell, and the principal villain, the demonic serial killer Asa Surrette, in a Montana landscape haunted by the ghosts of the Nez Perce and the private spectres that many of the characters carry around inside their own heads.
Anyway so I've been reading that. Also I've started looking into the work of the more famous southern novelist Flannery O'Connor, an acknowledged influence on Burke but also on the worldview of people like Nick Cave. She was an incredible gifted writer with a profound intellect who was also a Catholic, in a part of the world (South Carolina) where the majority of the population were Southern Baptists or other Protestant free church denominations. The book I read of hers, 'Wise Blood', is incredibly bizarre and powerful, a fable, basically, of a returned soldier from WW2 who goes back to his home state having lost his faith, and is so disgusted at the religious complacency and hypocrisy of his people that he founds a 'Church without christ', and starts preaching on the street. It ends in a shocking and bewildering fashion but is also very moving and isn't by any stretch of the imagination an atheist novel, rather showing the desperate, crazy attempts of ignorant people for some kind of meaningful transcendence in a culture that is suffocating in its narrowness of vision.
Why am I getting into Catholic writers? I don't necessarily think their catholicism defines them, as their writing is beautiful. However there is something about the worldview of catholicism, of the idea of 'the human comedy', of grace, redemption and the reality of good and evil, plus a certain skepticism toward the claims of modernity that can make for very compelling writing.
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