Dear Flannery,
I sent off some of my revised stories and now they are coming back. Sigh. Of course I thought they might. Have to keep studying up on the latest markets. But I have to admit I am becoming somewhat doubtful that the topics I write about will be welcomed anywhere these days.
Take so-called Christian Literary Journals. They are currently publishing stories wherein nothing much happens. Common casts of characters are damaged, lost, profane, tattooed and pierced, diamond-in-the-rough, young people. These young people get spontaneously befriended by extremely tolerant, open-minded, quirky, cool, hip, home-schooled, nonjudgmental, fawning young Christians (usually gangly with red hair and freckles) who also are supposed to know a great deal of theology. Such a story ends with the young reader believing that the befriended lost soul will inevitably be "saved" in the near future by the irresistable young Christian just because the young Christian is so irresistable. This is literature the editors describe as dealing with real life, not shying away from messy issues, confronting contemporary issues head-on, and so forth. So much for the "Christian" and the "Literary" part of these journals.
Reading these types of stories online, I scribbled on the notepad I keep by my computer, "Flannery would hate this." Even if these situations were in any way realistic, they seem utterly worthless. Like you wrote in "Novelist and Believer," "Today's audience [and that was in the 50s and 60s---it's exponentially worse now] is one in which religious feeling has become, if not atrophied, at least vaporous and sentimental."
General literary journals are no better. They are much too full of misery, sex, and profanity, which offends my taste as well as yours. And it's a lot of misery, sex, and profanity portrayed as being the way things are and the only way they can be. More to the point, these stories are one big vulgar whine. They are like soap operas that never end; they just keep flowing miserably nowhere and people only read them to feel better about their own lives that keep flowing miserably nowhere. It seems that these are what sell in a world that cares only for the Self. The Self's feelings, the Self's comforts, the Self's whims, the Self's rights, the Self's entitlements. Boring, huh? These are not good stories because, as you said, there is no sort of change or conversion happening.
Like you wrote in a letter to Cecil Dawkins, "The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own efforts."Oh wait, man doesn't have to make any efforts at all, especially that pesky spiritual exercise, that thought process, the scriptures like to call repentance.
J.
