Finishing Proust, and reading The Violent Bear It Away

I recently finished reading Proust (again). Wagner recommended a three-day diet of Bach canatas  coming down from his Ring Cycle. I’m reading Flannery O’Connor to come down from Proust. Certainly O’Connor shares with Bach a vision of the world that has at its foundations Christianity at its most astringent; and that astringency is in marked contrast to Proust’s divagations. More about the last volume of Proust another time.

Wagner failed, however,  to tell us what we might then take to come down from the Bach, and  today I’m stumbling out of O’Connor’s landscape, disoriented and as if trying to remember how to see in colour.

All the way to the last page I had no idea how she was going to pull off an ending. I imagined myself as the novelist, having no idea what to do. She tells us on the first page that Tarwater’s great uncle has been buried, and did not perish in a fire as Tarwater believed. We know that Tarwater will find the burial mound. We know that something else must happen but we cannot imagine what. That O’Connor does manage to pull off what she does (I won’t spoil it by saying how the novel ends, anyway it is  much wrought in the language, and would seem banal said straight out) is a measure of her genius. There’s a life just out which I might take a look at. She died aged only 39 I see.