O’Connor had no cause to disprize university writing programs, for she herself, despite the marked individuality of her work, was the first prominent American author to have been significantly shaped by one. Scholars who examine her early manuscripts, housed at what is now called simply Georgia College, are always taken aback by their awkwardness. As she freely acknowledged, she came into her own as an artist only after undergoing a full New Critical initiation at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Andrew Lytle, with Brooks and Warren’s then ubiquitous Understanding Fiction providing the models.
Like so many college-trained writers who have succeeded her, O’Connor never wrote without a sense of the critics looking over her shoulder. Nor, in her shorter fiction at least, did she ever stray from the regnant Creative Writing mode. Even the most impressive and original of her stories adhere to the classroom formula of her day: show, don’t tell; keep the narrative voice distinct from those of your characters; cultivate understatement; develop a central image or symbol to convey your theme “objectively”; and point everything toward one neatly sprung ironic reversal. No one has ever put it all together with greater deftness.
A cynic might say, then, that in lionizing O’Connor the American university has not so much acknowledged a literary genius as bestowed a posthumous laurel on its most diligent student. Whatever the reason, O’Connor now holds a niche in the anthologies nearly as secure-looking as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s and more so than those of, say, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Lewis, and Dos Passos. Virtually every American survey course sets aside a day for one of her crystalline, eminently teachable stories such as “Revelation,” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or “Good Country People.” The violence of action and freakishness of portraiture that troubled many of her earliest readers scarcely raise an eyebrow today, while the ironies, paradoxes, Doppelgängers, and image patterns that she so painstakingly implanted in her texts stand available for moralized “close reading” of exactly the sort that she herself mastered at Iowa four decades ago.
* Connor’s sensibility, as she well knew, was maladapted to the incremental, circumstantial, untranscendent development that typically sustains a novel between its moments of peak signification. Her two quirky novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, are considerably alike in theme and structure if not in texture. Both of them, especially Wise Blood, are top-heavy with obvious symbols. More damagingly, neither succeeds in enlisting most readers’ sympathy with, or even their credence in, the final turn toward salvation that the author imposes on her spasmodic, one-dimensional, Christfleeing protagonist. And even the individually dazzling stories, once we have been alerted to the world view that animates them, can all be seen to be performing the same religious maneuver—namely, a humbling of secular egoism to make way for a sudden infusion of God’s grace. That is not, one would think, a device with a great deal of literary mileage left in it, either inside or beyond the university.
* In the entire body of Flannery O’Connor’s available statements, both public and private, one finds not a whisper of dissent from the central teachings of Roman Catholicism—from the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the reality of heaven, Satan, and the angels to the belief that the Church is God’s sole medium for dispensing both redemption and divine truth. The literally present body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, she declared, “is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.” Nor did she experience her hereditary faith—she was a fourth-generation Georgia Catholic—as inhibiting her art in any way. On the contrary, she considered Christian dogma at once “an instrument for penetrating reality” and a preventative against the relativism that was threatening, she felt, to leave modern fiction insipid and directionless.
* O’Connor’s real reason for writing, she said more than once, was simply that she was good at it. In her view, a writer could only follow her imagination wherever it led and then hope to exert some ethical control over the result.
