Catholic Artist: Flannery O'Connor

Here I am, back for another Catholic Artist post! I feel like I've worked harder for this one, having read several of O'Connor's works for the first time, plus reread some of what I'd already read. It was good to get better acquainted with her, even if her work still stymies me. (The rest of the posts in this series are also requiring me to read a whole bunch of works that I hadn't read yet by authors I really enjoy, so it's a good fun time.) 

What I've Read:
Mystery and Manners
The Habit of Being
Wise Blood
The Complete Stories
The Violent Bear It Away

Other Works By O'Connor (that I have yet to get to):
The Presence of Grace
A Prayer Journal

Since O'Connor is not one of the better-known authors ever, I thought I'd give a brief sketch of her life before we get started. (All info from what I've read + Wikipedia). She was born on the feast of the Annunciation (also the day the Ring was thrown into Mordor) and was an only child. Her father died of lupus when she was sixteen. She and her mother subsequently lived on a farm, where, later on, she kept peacocks (her devotion to her peacocks is one of my favorite things in her collected letters, as it's very relatable for me, except with goats). She achieved several degrees, and time at several prestigious writer's communities, during which she worked on her stories, both short stories and novels. When she was 27, she was also diagnosed with lupus, and died in 1964 at age 39. 

Writing about O'Connor's work is a bit different than writing about other Catholic artist's work, partially because O'Connor wrote nonfiction about her fiction, and also about what it means to be a Catholic artist, which makes my job both harder and easier, easier because I have her own ideas to incorporate, and harder because I need to think about how her nonfiction ideas line up with her fiction! (And because what she wrote was just kinda weird at times. XD) But we shall forge ahead.

It's Mystery and Manners, the collection of her writing on the work of an author, that provides the best framework here, and that's the framework I'm going to work within, describing her thoughts from that book, while also inserting my thoughts on her fiction where I think they fit. Savvy? 

O'Connor approached fiction with a really unique point of view for her time, and even still, in my opinion. She was very frustrated with people who wanted authors--especially religious authors--to produce fiction that was "uplifting" and "inspirational". For her, those things lacked realism. More on that in a second. She observes, however, almost in defense of the demand for "uplifting" fiction, that the need of the "tired reader" is "to be lifted up", and that we need stories of the redemptive act, the offering of restoration of what is fallen. But readers nowadays, she proposes, have forgotten the cost of redemption, and expect immediate uplift, instead of all of the brokenness and difficulty and uncertainty which really accompanies it.

Because, in her view, the mark of a really good author was his or her vision: the ability to look at the world, in its brokenness and difficulty and uncertainty, with its warped and even grotesque people, and reproduce that faithfully in fiction. And wanting "uplifting" fiction really interferes with that. Sometimes even wanting "moral" fiction interferes with that. She uses Graham Greene (who I'll be talking about later in this series, and I'm VERY excited about that) as an example, noting that many people (especially Catholics) were upset with his depictions of affairs, promiscuity, &c, especially in Catholic characters. But if he hadn't depicted those things in his fiction, in some ways he'd be being false both to his God-given talent and to life. She piquantly observes later that even "Catholic life as seen by a Catholic doesn't always make comfortable reading for Catholics”, because Catholics are fallen and warped people, just as much as everyone else, only, we have grace working in us to try to make us less warped. And it doesn’t always work all of the time. 

O'Connor connects this to her own writing, often described as "grotesque", observing that the writer who writes about grotesque characters may not consider them more strange or freakish than the average fallen man.

O'Connor's characters, however, are incontrovertibly grotesque, much of the time. There's no danger of anyone mistaking any of her fiction for "uplifting", at least not immediately, and no danger of anyone seeing her characters as anything but broken and warped. I mean, think about Enoch Emery, who watches the bathing women every day. Think about all of the characters with really broken family relationships, the ones who hate their mothers, or husbands, or sons-in-law. Think about the old man in "The Geranium" and "Judgement Day", and his own warped view of black people...and the black man's warped and hateful view of him. 
None of her characters are perfect. All of her characters are really broken and warped and sinful. Some of her characters make me think "do you have no trust in human nature, Flannery?"
But then there are characters and moments of grace, like the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find", which make me think that maybe she does have a bit of trust that human nature isn't all broken. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. 

 

Somewhat paradoxically, O'Connor didn't think that reproducing life exactly as it appears on the surface was the best way to write fiction, either. She says,

"all novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality...if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious...his kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward towards the limits of mystery...he will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves."

And

"We Catholics are very much given to the Instant Answer. Fiction doesn't have any. It leaves us, like Job, with a renewed sense of mystery."

So, mystery and realism are intrinsically connected, which in O’Connor’s view, is related to the Catholic stance against Manicheanism, which, she postulates, has invaded modern fiction to a certain point, separating the physical from the spiritual, and wanting to show the spiritual realities and lofty principles “off in the ether”, as it were. Hence, the demand for “uplifting” novels. Instead, though, the novel must be grounded irrevocably in the quotidian details of daily life, and the sense experience. That’s how humans experience life, and that’s how we experience grace. God became man, in order to reach out to us. Thus, the action of grace must be described through the physical and banal details of life, which the modern reader may not be as satisfied by. She also notes that “a concern with grace is not a concern with exalted human behavior”, but rather with the action of grace in tiny ways in someone’s real and daily life. What makes a story work or hang together is often one action, through which grace or Divine life shows through, transcending allegory, but revealing mystery.

The mystery, and the action of grace in daily and quotidian life, is something that is extremely present in her writing, especially in her short stories. It's actually to a point where I'm not sure I can actually understand what she's getting at all of the time. I can read what she's saying, and I can sometimes see where that's going in terms of grace, but the rest of the time, I'm mostly in the dark...but left with something to ponder. I think that actually makes her stories stick with me longer. Like "The Turkey". It's just a story about a boy and a turkey, and yet I still wonder where the grace is, exactly. It's kind of a fun game, as a reader, to try to figure out where the one action is where grace and Divine life show through. I can definitely see it in some of her short stories, and not others. I can always see the brokenness. I can't always see the grace. And if that's not true to life, I don't know what is. I think some of that is that I need to grow more. And maybe some of it is that she's too obscure. But maybe some of it also is that in real life, we don't always know where the grace is until long after. As a reader, it can be frustrating, because you can sense that there is a point to the story, but you can't find it. Maybe just until much later; maybe not ever, but you know it's there, still. It's a very interesting time. 

(All of that leads me to say that I really wouldn't feel qualified to talk about O'Connor except with her own thoughts to guide me. XD)

That covers (more or less) what she refers to as the sense of mystery. But she notes that mystery is not the only thing need to make good fiction--the other is what she calls "manners", or a specific sense of place, a specific idiom and set of behaviors that ground a story where it belongs. That connects up quite well with the need for physical details, so I won’t say much more about that, except that O’Connor is quite insistent that the Catholic novel in particular needs a sense of place, and a culture it can grapple with (which is not the Church, which cannot be used as “a culture”).

And O'Connor's grasp of manners is impeccable. She sets her stories in the South, which has a very distinct idiom, a distinct speech pattern, and a distinct set of mores, all of which mark her stories distinctly. Along with that, she has a tendency to focus on "ordinary people". Together, those two choices make her stories very conscious of the man in the cabbage field. More on the South in a moment...

But first, on to more about the human judgement and the action of grace, and the portrayal of that!

Novels aren't supposed, she says, to explore human feelings only, or even to imitate them only, but rather also the "whole range of human judgement", which brings in the matter of exploring and imitating the human will and conscience, which will make judgements on good and evil. Good and evil, and judgements of them, then, are inseparable from literature, and so the author's opinion on good and evil is extremely important.

Thus, the novelist doesn't just write what he thinks is true and good, but wants to make the reader think the things he writes about are true and good, and that's a difficult proposition if the reader has different views from the writer, and that means that the writer may need to warp the novel in order to make the reader feel and see what matters. 

O’Connor gives the example, as actually used in one of her short stories, of needing to give a baptism emotional depth, which naturally warps the actual sacrament a bit for readers who are believers. 

One of the things which makes all this kind of strange is her alignment of herself and her stories with the "backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists" of the South, in opposition to "those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development". That's one of the ways in which she tries to give her stories emotional depth and significance, to show what's important, and try to convince the reader of that.

Only, it backfires a little bit in the modern world, somehow, even as a Catholic reader. And I think it may be a flaw in myself, because I am a very intellectual person, and maybe sometimes my faith gets a little distanced from the core of me, in the shuffle. But reading especially The Violent Bear It Away, which centers around a boy who essentially, against all reason, thinks he is called to be a prophet, was the absolute weirdest flip-flopping of points of view for me personally, because I couldn't tell if I was supposed to take the prophetic pretensions of Francis Tarwater seriously, or if I should take the efforts on the part of his older relation to "cure" him seriously. And I could tell that the issue of his prophetic calling--if it existed--was extremely important, but I was on the side of the learned relative, except then that was not the author's intention at all, and the triumph of the book is the prophecy of the boy. (It's a lot more complicated than that, but in any case.) 

Which made me wonder why I'm so far away from O'Connor's own Catholic point of view, perhaps not the most comfortable thing to wonder. Whether or not you like her work, she makes an impact, that's for sure.

Speaking of the Catholic point of view, what about the author’s point of view? Doesn’t that affect the author’s vision—how he or she sees and writes about the world—at all? 

Yes.

As far as a Catholic has been thoroughly "Catholized", he or she will, as O'Connor calls it, "feel life" from the "standpoint of the central Christian mystery", which makes the field of view larger, not smaller. The assumption that the writer has that grace works through nature will be the skeleton of whatever the author is writing. To use her own quote,

"Part of the complexity of the problem for the Catholic fiction writer will be the presence of grace as it appears in nature, and what matters for him is that his faith not become detached from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is. No one in these days, however, would seem more anxious to have it be detached than those Catholics who demand that the writer limit, on the natural level, what he allows himself to see."

She postulates that the writer, being faithful and strong in his or her faith, can look at things truly, the worst of the world, and not have it become a snare for them. (Whether or not it becomes a snare then for the reader is a different question.)

However, that doesn't mean that Catholic novelists can or should use their books for proselytizing or moralizing purposes. Catholic worldview, yes. Pushing views on people and being super obvious, no. Novelists, her opinion is, should not write novels in order to evangelize, but, as St. Thomas Aquinas would back her up on, the novelist should be considered with whether what is written is good. If it's good, it will naturally reflect the Truth and the Good, or as she says, "what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God". So, calling something a "Catholic novel" is meaningless except inasmuch as the work reflects reality "adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships."

She definitely lives by that principle in her stories. All of them are rooted in her Catholicism, what with her view of human nature and grace as it comes through, but also with the Biblical echoes in many of her stories, the idea of a vocation and prophecy as being real, the reality of hell, and so on. But none of them try to evangelize the reader, but all of them try to draw the reader further into what it means to live and to be alive, even if it's in quite strange, possibly grotesque, and even unnerving ways.

I kind of think what I've done here is more about O'Connor's point of view on stories than about her own stories, but I also don't think I understand all of her writing as well as it could or should be understood, so I think maybe that's for the best. (And I hope that this whole post wasn't actually awful. XD)

Please let me know what you think! (Was this post actually terrible?) Have you read anything by Flannery O'Connor? Do you agree with her point of view on fiction writing and how it should be? Who's your favorite author who seems to show the world in a really true-to-life way? 

Also, have a happy Thanksgiving!! :) I hope y'all have a lovely time with family--I will certainly be enjoying my time off!