Continuing matters from the previous post. . .
“The novelist must be characterized not by his function but by his vision. . . .”
Flannery O’Connor routinely rejected the view that novelists, & by extension all artists, are to be reduced to some specific social function or utilitarian purpose. Such a view detracts from the goodness of art in itself, a point she draws from St. Thomas Aquinas through Jacques Maritain:
“Saint Thomas Aquinas says that art does not require rectitude of the appetite, that it is wholly concerned with the good of that which is made. He says that a work of art is good in itself, & this is a truth that the modern world has largely forgotten. We are not content to stay within our limitations & make something that is simply a good in & of itself. Now we want to make something that will have some utilitarian value. Yet what is good in itself glorifies God because it reflects God. The artist has his hands full & does his duty if he attends to his art. He can safely leave evangelizing to the evangelists.”
Insisting on the utilitarian value of art is just one of the characteristics of the modern age. In “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” originally an address given in 1960, O’Connor contrasts the fiction writer in tune with the modern spirit & the one in tune with a less confidently secular one. She had a number of things to say about modern secularism & how it is expressed in fiction. Here she notes its effects on the apphrehension of mystery:
“Since the eighteenth century, the popular spirit of each succeeding age has tended more & more to the view that the ills & mysteries of life will eventually fall before the scientific advances of man, a belief that is still going strong even though this is the first generation to face total extinction because of these advances. If the novelist is in tune with this spirit, if he believes that actions are predetermined by psychic make-up or the economic situation or some other determinable factor, then he will be concerned above all with an accurate reproduction of the things that most immediately concern man, with the natural forces that he feels control his destiny.”
How do we envision ourselves as human persons & our place in our world? Every writer will have to answer this metaphysical question, explicitly or not. The modern writer will often assume a materialistic framework, & thus, according to O’Connor, oversimplify matters. They may achieve a measure of artistic success & even “produce a great tragic naturalism,” but only by “transcend(ing) the limitations of his narrow vision.” A different type of writer, however, will assume a different vision of the human person, & thus be able see behind or through the natural world & its material forces:
“On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.
One can speak of the Christian writer as one who allows their work, & the characters in their stories, a greater freedom than their secular peers, one not limited or denied by a deterministic metaphysic. The secular confidence in naked reason, unmoored from its natural relationship with revelation & respect for mystery, eventually leads the writer down a blind alley, as genuine drama requires something more than a predetermined set of motivations or conclusions. O’Connor speaks here of possibility:
Such a writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than in what we do. He will be interested in possibility rather than in probability. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace and who act on a trust beyond themselves–whether they know very clearly what it is they act upon or not. To the modern mind, this kind of character, and his creator, are typical Don Quixotes, tilting at what is not there.”
This corresponds to the writer’s prophetic role. And just as the biblical prophet of old was rejected for his idiosyncratic visions, the writer, Christian or not, who retains a respect for possibility & mystery will appear odd. The modern secular mind sees little beneath the surface of things other than immutable physical, economic, social, or psychological laws. The writer who embraces the prophetic mantle, on the other hand, sees in surface realities an invitation:
“In the novelist’s case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances, and it is this kind of realism that you find in the best modern instances of the grotesque.”
—Anthony DiStefano
