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Joyce Carol Oates on Flannery O'Connor
April 9, 2009
Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is "cartoon" art invariably inferior to "realist" art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the "realist" struggles to establish the trompe l'oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O'Connor called "large and startling figures."
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Winter 1998
Suffused with Catholic ideology, or in any case a passionate wish to believe in Christ and salvation by way of the Catholic Church, Flannery O'Connor is the most visual and relentlessly "symbolic" of writers. Her dreamlike rural landscapes are alive with that intense, primitive power of the inwardly focused imagination we find in the seventeenth-century New England Puritans and in other deeply religious individuals for whom nothing can be accidental, contingent, or without meaning; on the contrary, everything is charged with significance; as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has said, "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." When such believers are gifted with imagination (and what is imagination but, in part, a mysterious metaphor-making capacity), the "natural" world scarcely exists except as a supernatural manifestation; surfaces are masks through which an underlying, far more significant reality asserts itself in ways that may be startling and original and sometimes grotesque.
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1983
Though she had, evidently, no more than a conventional critical sensibility—she dismissed Randall Jarrell's marvelous Pictures from an Institution as bad fiction, she referred to Virginia Woolf as a "nut," and declared that she couldn't tell Mozart from Spike Jones, and despised the piano "and all its works"—she did possess a highy reliable talent for assessing her own work. She seems always to have known that she wrote well; that she was gifted. She saw how Wise Blood failed, she saw how certain of her stories—"Revelation," "Judgment Day," "Parker's Back"—succeeded beautifully. Having spent months on the long story, The Lame Shall Enter First, she saw that it simply didn't come off, and tried—too late, as it happened—to stop its publication in Sewanee Review. Her instincts about her own fiction were always right. She wrote ingenious parables of the spiritual life, and her characters were drawn with broad, slashing strokes—"I am not one of the subtle sensitive writers like Eudora Welty," she says—meant to suggest, but not to embody, "reality." A creator of romances, like Hawthorne, or even Poe; but one with a fine, sharp eye for the absurd.
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1974
... she also knows—it is this point, I believe, missed by those critics who are forever stressing her "irony"—that the entire process is divine. Hence her superficially reactionary attitude toward the secularized, liberal, godless society, and her affirmation of the spontaneous, the irrational, the wisdom of the blood in which, for her, Christ somehow is revealed. Because she does believe and states clearly that her writing is an expression of her religious commitment, and is itself a kind of divine distortion ("the kind that reveals, or should reveal," as she remarks in the essay "Novelist and Believer"), the immediate problem for most critics is how to wrench her work away from her, how to show that she didn't at all know herself, but must be subjected to a higher, wiser, more objective consciousness in order to be understood. But the amazing thing about O'Connor is that she seems to have known exactly what she was doing and how she might best accomplish it. There is no ultimate irony in her work, no ultimate despair or pessimism or tragedy, and certainly not a paradoxical sympathy for the devil. It is only when O'Connor is judged from a secular point of view, or from a "rational" point of view, that she seems unreasonable—a little mad—and must be chastely revised by the liberal imagination.
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Winter 1971
Reading and rereading this book is a moving experience: not only is Mystery and Manners (Occasional Prose of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) a valuable and exciting collection of essays in itself, it is a testament to the deep humanity of Miss O'Connor, to the modesty and wisdom and gentle humor that lay behind her vivid, sometimes repulsive fictional accomplishments. Her death at the age of thirty-nine is one of our bitterest losses. It is impossible to guess, given the body of work she has left and the evidence of shrewd, speculative intelligence in these essays, just how far she might have gone; as it is she remains one of our finest writers, though she has not written any single "masterpiece."
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page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/onoconnor.html
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