I sometimes wonder if Catholics who profess a love of the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, JRR Tolkien, & other luminaries of Catholic literature do so primarily because of the faith of these authors, & not their fiction. Cynical of me, perhaps, but it has been common for American Catholics to judge an artist’s work less by aesthetic criteria than by whether or not their work could be claimed for the Church or used to defend the faith. O’Connor addressed this issue throughout her letters in The Habit of Being & the essays & addresses published in Mystery & Manners, & her reflections are well worth considering. Preparing for teaching her next year has led me back to these sources for a closer look & raised for me a host of questions. How to read her stories & novels in light of her reflections on art & writing is a hot topic of debate among scholars, with nearly everyone protesting a simplistic reading which uses the essays as a template to interpret the stories. O’Connor spoke to some of the concerns that readers of her fiction had in her own day, including the utilitarian aesthetic assumed by many of her Catholic readers & which she countered with St. Thomas Aquinas, among other Catholic sources (cf. her quote from Thomas on the Quotes page). I find it ironic that Catholics who profess an admiration for Thomas often ignore what he says about this topic. In what follows I want to highlight a few of O’Connor’s concerns as a Catholic author, stressing both parts of that phrase, in part to work through things for myself & also to invite comments from interested readers who have similar concerns & questions. These reflections are scattered & partially unformed, in need of further thought & probably revision, but what’s the point of a blog unless you can sound ignorant? Some of what O’Connor says puzzles me, &, as is often the case, the secondary literature sometimes obfuscates rather than clarifies, no doubt due in part to my inability to see what I’m supposed to see. At any rate, all quotes are from Mystery & Manners, which is, occasional & incomplete as it remains, in my opinion an essential work of Christian aesthetics.
I’ll start with a quote from her address “Novelist & Believer”:
“Ever since there have been such things as novels, the world has been flooded with bad fiction for which the religious impulse has been responsible. The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, & that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns, getting himself as little dirty in the process as possible. His feeling about this may have been made more definite by one of those Manichean-type theologies which sees the natural world as unworthy of penetration. But the real novelist, the one with an instinct for what he is about, knows that he cannot approach the infinite directly, that he must penetrate the natural human world as it is. The more sacramental his theology, the more encouragement he will get from it to do just that.”
To “penetrate concrete reality” is the goal of the novelist, a point O’Connor finds support for in writers such as Henry James & Joseph Conrad. Religious persuasion is irrelevant here to a point, for the Catholic novelist shares this goal with the non-Catholic & non-Christian. Yet this is not just an aesthetic mandate, as the Catholic author has an added dimension of reality to perceive & articulate. The Incarnation has illustrated that the natural world is most worthy of penetration, & the more sacramental a writer’s theology, according to O’Connor, the more encouraged he will be to do so. All Catholic fiction, &, by extension, all Catholic art will be shaped by an incarnational faith that refuses to disparage the material world or elevate the spiritual over the material. The writer, as a Catholic, must look for the spiritual in & through the material, unlike the Manichean (& many a Protestant), who tries to eliminate the material & pass directly to the spiritual. Thus, the bad writer will imagine that his faith will “see” for him & make any engagement with the natural world unnecessary & penetration impossible. The result for the Catholic writer is what O’Connor routinely dismisses as over-pious fiction which betrays the task of the artist by thinking that art exists to teach & evangelize. It doesn’t, she insists:
“Every day we see people who are busy distorting their talents in order to enhance their popularity or to make money that they could do without. We can safely say that this, if done consciously, is reprehensible. But even oftener, I think, we see people distorting their talents in the name of God for reasons that they think are good—to reform or to teach or to lead people to the Church. And it is much less easy to say that this is reprehensible. None of us is able to judge such people themselves, but we must, for the sake of truth, judge the products they make. We must say whether this or that novel truthfully portrays the aspect of reality that it sets out to portray. The novelist who deliberately misuses his talent for some good purpose may be committing no sin, but he is certainly committing a grave inconsistency, for he is trying to reflect God with what amounts to a practical untruth.”
It’s important to note what O’Connor isn’t saying here. She does not reject the important role of faith in understanding the natural world, or assume an aesthetic autonomy that sees the Church & its creed as impositions which stifle the writer. “I am no disbeliever in spiritual purpose & no vague believer,” she wrote in “The Fiction Writer & His Country.” “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ & what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.” Her point is that the Catholic author has an obligation, as an author, to the integrity of the natural world. The demands of art require attentiveness & imagination, & not just pious phrases. Even the best authors struggle to write well, & none can plumb the depths of the mystery that lies at the heart of reality. “The Lord doesn’t speak to the novelist as he did to his servant Moses, mouth to mouth,” O’Connor said. “He speaks to him as he did to those two complainers, Aaron & Aaron’s sister, Mary: through dreams & visions, in fits & starts, & by all the lesser & limited ways of the imagination.” Thus her impatience with the kind of piety that demands the “Instant Answer”:
“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. St. Gregory wrote that every time the sacred text describes a fact, it reveals a mystery. This is what the fiction writer, on his lesser level, hopes to do. The danger for the writer who is spurred by the religious view of the world is that he will consider this to be two operations instead of one. He will try to enshrine the mystery without the fact, and there will follow a further set of separations which are inimical to art. Judgment will be separated from vision, nature from grace, and reason from imagination.
“These are separations which we see in our society and which exist in our writing. They are separations which faith tends to heal if we realize that faith is a “walking in darkness” and not a theological solution to mystery. The poet is traditionally a blind man, but the Christian poet, and storyteller as well, is like the blind man whom Christ touched, who looked then and saw men as if they were trees, but walking. This is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to learn to accept if we want to realize a truly Christian literature.”
Again, this is not simply a question of aesthetics. At stake is an entire theology. A Catholic can not be a Manichean, O’Connor would say. To borrow a phrase from John Paul II, she is concerned with defending the incarnational logic of Christianity against those who would assume that the material world is an indifferent matter at best, or an obstacle to spiritual truths at worst. The literary Manichean, I suppose we could say, will avoid O’Connor’s “fact” & look for only the “mystery.” Or, to put it more colloquially, he or she will, in their rush to get to the spiritual meat of a piece of art, neglect the plate it is served on. But even that rather lame metaphor misses the point, for the content & form can not be so easily separated. The “fiction writer,” she says, “is concerned with mystery that is lived. He’s concerned with ultimate mystery as we find it embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.” The form is the content, in other words, as O’Connor says when addressing the meaning & theme of a story in “Writing Short Stories”:
“I prefer to talk about the meaning in a story rather than the theme of a story. People talk about the theme of a story as if the theme were like the string that a sack of chicken feed is tied with. They think that if you can pick out the theme, the way you pick the right thread in the chicken-feed sack, you can rip the story open & feed the chickens. . . . The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can’t be said in any other way, & it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story. The meaning of fiction is is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, & the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience the meaning more fully.”
Elsewhere O’Connor rejects the notion of reading a story & then “climb(ing) out of it into the meaning.” This turns a story into a problem to be solved, “something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.” For her, however, the whole story is the meaning, “because it is an experience, not an abstraction.”
A filmmaker or critic could say the same thing about their art form, as could the musician, sculptor, painter, & so on. Many Catholics today unconsciously assume a Manichean pose when demanding of their art some utilitarian function in support or defense of the faith. If a work is suspect doctrinally, many will insist, the faithful should avoid it, regardless of its artistic merit. This is a sticky issue, recalling the Index, not to mention Catholic handwringing over works like the Harry Potter series. Speaking about similar concerns in her time, O’Connor said that “Many Catholic readers are overconscious of what they consider to be obscenity in modern fiction for the very simple reason that in reading a book, they have nothing else to look for. They are not equipped to find anything else. They are totally unconscious of the design, the tone, the intention, the meaning, or even the truth of what they have in hand. They don’t see the book in a perspective that would reduce every part of it to its proper place in the whole.” Such a negative response may, according to O’Connor, result from weak faith & possibly also from a “general inability to read.” This inattentiveness to the work itself, from Catholics & others, is precisely what O’Connor laments in her considerations on fiction. Pay closer attention to the art, she says; Do not judge an artist by his doctrine, or a work by its agreement with the Church. Most of all, do not reject the important role of the imagination, something she accused American Catholics of doing: “he trusts the fictional imagination about as little as he trusts anything. Before it is well on its feet, he is worrying about how to control it.” There is a place for moral criticism, something O’Connor frequently admits. “What offends my taste in fiction,” she wrote in a letter, “is when right is held up as wrong, or wrong is right.” But even here things are not so simple, for the fiction writer has an obligation to the truth “of what can happen in life, & not to the reader—not to the reader’s taste, not to the reader’s happiness, not even to the reader’s morals.” And this leads to the further claim that not only does the Catholic novelist not have to be a saint, he “doesn’t even have to be a Catholic.”
“The very term “Catholic novel” is, of course, suspect, and people who are conscious of its complications don’t use it except in quotation marks. If I had to say what a “Catholic novel” is, I could only say that it is one that represents reality adequately as we see it manifested in this world of things and human relationships. Only in and by these sense experiences does the fiction writer approach a contemplative knowledge of the mystery they embody.
“To be concerned with these things means not only to be concerned with the good in them, but with the evil, and not only with the evil, but also with that aspect which appears neither good nor evil, which is not yet Christianized. The Church we see, even the universal Church, is a small segment of the whole of creation. If many are called and few are chosen, fewer still perhaps choose, even unconsciously, to be Christian, and yet all of reality is the potential kingdom of Christ, and the face of the earth is waiting to be recreated by his spirit. This all means that what we roughly call the Catholic novel is not necessarily about a Christianized or Catholicized world, but simply that it is one in which the truth as Christians know it has been used as a light to see the world by. This may or may not be a Catholic world, and it may or may not have been seen by a Catholic.”
The issue here, as elsewhere for O’Connor, is the type of honest vision the writer must bear witness to. The product will not suit all tastes, as we have seen, for the weak in faith will often protest at the contents of a story or novel. But just as the writer has obligations, so too does the reader:
“We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards. And this is certainly the obligation of the Catholic. It is his obligation in all the disciplines of life but most particularly in those on which he presumes to pass judgment. Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an ax, and with moral indignation, then it becomes something else indeed. We reflect the Church in everything we do, and those who can see clearly that our judgment is false in matters of art cannot be blamed for suspecting our judgment in matters of religion.”
To be a good writer, then, is to serve the truth & the Church. There will be tensions, as every serious writer will come to understand, not least because other Catholics will often fail to understand the writer’s aims & accomplishments. The Catholic writer will often fail, as well, either in conception or execution. But the conscientious writer, & artist of every kind, will embrace their vocation & wrestle with the tension between time & eternity, between the natural & supernatural, seeking answers to these questions:
“Just how can the novelist be true to time and eternity both, to what he sees and what he believes, to the relative and the absolute? And how can he do all this and be true at the same time to the art of the novel, which demands the illusion of life?”
O’Connor sought to fulfill the vocation of a Catholic writer by focusing on the effects of original sin. Her stories are littered with bizarre characters & situation, to the consternation of many readers who often see her world as one of nihilism & despair. In a world where grandmothers & their families are murdered by escaped convicts, where children drown & hang themselves, & women are gored to death by bulls, one can expect questions. Some of O’Connor’s funniest lines are at the expense of the prim-&-proper crowd that wondered why there weren’t more happy people & situations in her work. Reading her work elicits from me the same kind of reaction I got when watching the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. “Is this a hopeless world? Is the ending hopeful, a sign of grace in the misery of a post-apocalyptic nightmare that seems to get worse at every step?” O’Connor said that “My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, & for the unacceptable.” Sin is corrosive, which any number of artists, believers or not, will testify, even if they refuse to call it sin. But the Christian will have something by which to judge the perverse as perverse, & not merely unpleasant or distasteful, & will know that sin is the preparation for the grace of the Incarnation & all it entails. “Redemption is meaningless,” O’Connor says, “unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, & for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause.” In her fiction O’Connor serves the truth by highlighting the pernicious effects of pride, arrogance, sloth, etc., & by allowing the reader to catch a glimpse, even as the forlorn characters of her stories & novels often do, of the grace that reveals & heals.
In 2000 U2 released “All That You Can’t Leave Behind” (check out how they changed the sign in the top left corner of the cover; that’s a reference to Jeremiah 33.3, “Call to me & I will answer you, & will tell you great & hidden things, which you have not known.”), which ended with a track titled “Grace.” It’s clear, I think, what the narrator is saying. Yes, it is a name for a girl, but it’s also “a thought that changed the world.” “She travels outside of karma,” we’re told, & she “makes beauty out of ugly things.” The Rolling Stone reviewer didn’t seem to catch any of the biblical & theological language, preferring to see this as a song about a girl. Something like this is at work in the way many read O’Connor, I think. If you don’t spell it out. . . . Yet O’Connor did “spell it out” in a way consistent with her understanding of the writer’s task & limitations. Not by writing in a this-means-that style, or by providing a glossary of terms. She wasn’t writings allegories or essays, but stories, which have their own narrative logic & integrity. Here’s what she said about the method she followed:
“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, & his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; & he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little & use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, & for the almost-blind you draw large & startling figures.
More to follow later; comments are appreciated.
—Anthony DiStefano
