Sunday, January 23
My latest Catholic Register column
The enigma of Flannery O'Connor
by Kathy Shaidle
The influence of Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) small oeuvre of bizarre, violent "Southern Gothic" fiction (a term she loathed) is wide-ranging and uneven: think of Slingblade, The Cramps, Wild at Heart, John Waters, Raising Arizona, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Diane Arbus, Quentin Tarantino and the white Northern hipster's condescending fascination with Elvis, "outsider art", televangelists and triple-named serial killers. For better or worse, all are hard to imagine without the example of Wise Blood or "Everything that Rises Must Converge".
Yet biographies of O'Connor are as "hard to find" as her titular "good man." Unlike literary icons Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, O'Connor didn't live a dissolute, suicidal existence of madness and adultery. She was sane and sober, lived with her mother and died a virgin -- of an unglamourous disease at that.
Nicole Kidman or Gwenyth Paltrow won't be playing O'Connor in a big budget Hollywood biopic.
O'Connor displayed a few eccentricities, like sewing clothes for her chickens, but neither these, nor her novels and short stories populated with Bible-belt "white trash" freaks and shot through with ultra-violence, have earned O'Connor the approval of our cultural elites. Her devout Catholicism cancels out everything else.
Catholics in O'Connor's lifetime weren't her biggest fans, either. Why couldn't she write about "something nice", as her mother put it? O'Connor's fiction doesn't star a single priest or nun, or one sentence-worth of sentimental piety (although weird "miracles" spring up at the oddest moments). In fact, her characters are "backward," born again Protestants, like O'Connor's Georgia neighbours.
Flannery O'Connor resists attempts to slot her into a convenient, constrictive category. In her long awaited (and therefore ultimately disappointing) biography, Jean W. Cash (Flannery O'Connor: A Life, 2002), tries to posthumously enlist O'Connor in the feminist cause. Cash quotes scholar Louise Westing approvingly: "If Flannery O'Connor had lived long enough for the feminist movement to arouse her awareness of society's injustices to women and of her own repressed rage, surely she would have confronted these problems consciously in her stories."
No admirer of O'Connor can avoid hearing her snort sharply from beyond the grave at such patronizing blather.
Meanwhile, Robert Ellsberg -- being Robert Ellsberg -- is keen to turn O'Connor into the kind of Catholic of which he most approves: a "spirit of Vatican II" type. In his Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings (2003) he claims that she somehow helped to "reconfigure a hierarchical church, run by princes, into the 'People of God' (...) It is no overstatement to say that O'Connor was a one-woman aggirornamento..."
Actually, Bob, it pretty much is.
Ellsberg is on firmer ground when clarifying the themes of O'Connor's often obtuse fiction; like Simone Weil, O'Connor specialized in articulating "the dynamics of grace." He explains that her characters' horrific humiliations and mutilations are God's attempts to capture their attention and penetrate their hardened hearts.
Ultimately, reading O'Connor's own (nonfiction) words is a bracing experience, and arguably the best "way in" to her writing. A self-described "hillbilly Thomist," her letters combine earthy slang and effortless wisdom to irresistible effect:
Readers also discovered in O'Connor's letters a surprisingly witty, lovable friend, who made the mysteries of Catholicism easier to understand, and palatable even to skeptics. The Habit of Being converted Robert Ellsberg (again, for better or worse) and not a few others, who came to the Church thanks to this volume of irrefutable evidence that an artistic genius could also be a faithful Catholic.
And a funny one, at that. Here, in an anecdote her misguided biographers would do well to reread, she recounts the questions she endured following a public reading:
by Kathy Shaidle
The influence of Flannery O'Connor's (1925-1964) small oeuvre of bizarre, violent "Southern Gothic" fiction (a term she loathed) is wide-ranging and uneven: think of Slingblade, The Cramps, Wild at Heart, John Waters, Raising Arizona, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Diane Arbus, Quentin Tarantino and the white Northern hipster's condescending fascination with Elvis, "outsider art", televangelists and triple-named serial killers. For better or worse, all are hard to imagine without the example of Wise Blood or "Everything that Rises Must Converge".
Yet biographies of O'Connor are as "hard to find" as her titular "good man." Unlike literary icons Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, O'Connor didn't live a dissolute, suicidal existence of madness and adultery. She was sane and sober, lived with her mother and died a virgin -- of an unglamourous disease at that.
Nicole Kidman or Gwenyth Paltrow won't be playing O'Connor in a big budget Hollywood biopic.
O'Connor displayed a few eccentricities, like sewing clothes for her chickens, but neither these, nor her novels and short stories populated with Bible-belt "white trash" freaks and shot through with ultra-violence, have earned O'Connor the approval of our cultural elites. Her devout Catholicism cancels out everything else.
Catholics in O'Connor's lifetime weren't her biggest fans, either. Why couldn't she write about "something nice", as her mother put it? O'Connor's fiction doesn't star a single priest or nun, or one sentence-worth of sentimental piety (although weird "miracles" spring up at the oddest moments). In fact, her characters are "backward," born again Protestants, like O'Connor's Georgia neighbours.
Flannery O'Connor resists attempts to slot her into a convenient, constrictive category. In her long awaited (and therefore ultimately disappointing) biography, Jean W. Cash (Flannery O'Connor: A Life, 2002), tries to posthumously enlist O'Connor in the feminist cause. Cash quotes scholar Louise Westing approvingly: "If Flannery O'Connor had lived long enough for the feminist movement to arouse her awareness of society's injustices to women and of her own repressed rage, surely she would have confronted these problems consciously in her stories."
No admirer of O'Connor can avoid hearing her snort sharply from beyond the grave at such patronizing blather.
Meanwhile, Robert Ellsberg -- being Robert Ellsberg -- is keen to turn O'Connor into the kind of Catholic of which he most approves: a "spirit of Vatican II" type. In his Flannery O'Connor: Spiritual Writings (2003) he claims that she somehow helped to "reconfigure a hierarchical church, run by princes, into the 'People of God' (...) It is no overstatement to say that O'Connor was a one-woman aggirornamento..."
Actually, Bob, it pretty much is.
Ellsberg is on firmer ground when clarifying the themes of O'Connor's often obtuse fiction; like Simone Weil, O'Connor specialized in articulating "the dynamics of grace." He explains that her characters' horrific humiliations and mutilations are God's attempts to capture their attention and penetrate their hardened hearts.
Ultimately, reading O'Connor's own (nonfiction) words is a bracing experience, and arguably the best "way in" to her writing. A self-described "hillbilly Thomist," her letters combine earthy slang and effortless wisdom to irresistible effect:
"The notice in the New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain section of the population like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead."When The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor was published to great acclaim in 1989, the long-dead author experienced a lively revival. Many who found her "comic" fiction baffling, revolting and decidedly unfunny were enlightened by O'Connor's attempts to explain her work.
Readers also discovered in O'Connor's letters a surprisingly witty, lovable friend, who made the mysteries of Catholicism easier to understand, and palatable even to skeptics. The Habit of Being converted Robert Ellsberg (again, for better or worse) and not a few others, who came to the Church thanks to this volume of irrefutable evidence that an artistic genius could also be a faithful Catholic.
And a funny one, at that. Here, in an anecdote her misguided biographers would do well to reread, she recounts the questions she endured following a public reading:
"'Miss O'Connor,' he said, 'why was the Misfit's hat black?' I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, 'Miss O'Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?' 'He does not,' I said. He looked crushed. 'Well, Miss O'Connor,' he said, 'what is the significance of the Misfit's hat?' I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone."
