Introduction: The Dragon of St Cyril

Abstract

In Mystery and Manners, a book of essays on the writing of fiction, Flannery O’Connor referred to the responsibility she felt as a writer to her readership, when she remarked: ‘I hate to think of the day when the Southern writer will satisfy the tired reader.’ She further explained that stories of any depth tell the tale, in an endless variety of disguises, of the mysterious passage past the dragon of St Cyril of Jerusalem, continuing: ‘it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.’¹ A few decades earlier, the American philosopher John Dewey had made a not unrelated observation, first paraphrasing a remark of John Keats: ‘no “reasoning”, as reasoning, that is, as excluding imagination and sense, can reach truth… Reason must fall back on imagination — upon the embodiment of ideas in an emotionally charged sense.’ Dewey then concluded:

Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge, and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities — to imagination and art.²