Joseph O’Neill on Flannery O’Connor

Joseph O’Neill (Netherland) ostensibly reviews Brad Gooch’s biography about Flannery O’Connor in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly, but really gives us an thoughtful essay about O’Connor and O’Neill’s responses to her work.

His main thrust is that O’Connor received fame early — she never eked out an existence as a struggling writer — yet her fortune in writing didn’t transfer to fortune in health. Diagnosed with her lupus at the age of 25 (her father also had the hereditary disease), dead by 39. Also, regarding O’Neill’s title, that the darkness in her fiction stemmed from being touched by the “low world” she inhabited in her fiction.

But when O’Neill begins to interpret some of the passages in O’Connor’s nonfiction, I have to quibble with him. He quotes from “Mystery and Manners”:

“the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.”

O’Neill responds by arguing that no,

“the Christian viewpoint does not necessitate a heightened sensitivity to that which is loathsome about humans or modern times. A heightened love of humans and the lives they create for themselves could just as easily be argued.”

O’Neill misinterprets what she’s saying. She’s not claiming a heightened sensitivity to the distortions/loathesome things in the world, as if Christians had superior senses. She is merely claiming difference — that what is repugnant to those within the Christian fold is different than what might be repugnant to someone outside it. Hence, her desire to spread her vision to others, to help them stop seeing it as merely natural. It’s a desire to proselytize, to be sure, but not a claim that Christians see evil better than anyone else.

For example, take Hazel Motes in “Wise Blood.” Motes infatuation with his car, and his substitution of the car for deeper meaning in life, is expressed in his famous line: “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified.”

O’Connor clearly felt that the over-dependence on and idolization of physical objects — a particularly diabolical form of materialism — was a distortion that many people treat as normal. So by exaggerating Motes’ relationship with his car, to the point of having him claim that a car was a perfectly fine substitution for any form of spirituality, not only exposes the ludicrous nature of such of belief, but also how many of us embody such a ridiculous belief in our everyday actions. It’s wicked satire at its best.

O’Neill continues to connect the quote with the grotesque in O’Connor’s work, saying

“(1) from the Christian viewpoint, the modern human condition is filled with a peculiar horror; (2) therefore, to fictionally depict humans in their peculiarly horrifying aspect is necessary in order to explore the mysteries of redemption and grace.”

Regarding (1), I think from any person’s viewpoint the modern human condition is filled with peculiar horror. Conrad’s Kurtz will second the motion.

Regarding (2), of course. Unless you’re writing fables, or children’s stories, or parables, or some other literary form, modern literature — especially the novel — is concerned with a faithful depiction of humanity, warts and all. So why would any religious work shy away from that? I mean, at the heart of “redemption and grace” is the violence of the crucifixion. When O’Connor marries redemption/grace to horror/grotesque, she is only illuminating a unity that has always been present in Christianity, not making a radically new statement.

But go read O’Neill’s article for yourself. It has a number of great lines, one of which I’ll leave you with: “O’Connor was above all faithful to a baleful comic vision derived, surely, from an ancient, artistically wholesome tradition of misanthropy.” O’Connor as misanthrope? More likely her characters.