Thursday, November 06, 2008

From Notre Dame lecture on Southern Fiction

Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth...It's a quality that no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense, so the word is always safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is the true anti-bourgeois style, but I think the kind of hazy, compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.

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