THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508040675
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
UNDERSTANDING FLANNERY O'CONNOR
MARGARET EARLEY WHITT
University of South Carolina Press. 261 pp. $34.95.
T.S. ELIOT, having once been urged to read the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, wrote to Russell Kirk to report that he had perused a book of her stories and was ``quite horrified by those I read. She has certainly an uncanny talent of high order but my nerves are just not strong enough to take much of a disturbance.''
It is easy to read O'Connor's fiction as simply dark cartoons portraying Southerners as hayseeds, or even to read them as nihilistic yarns bespeaking life's absurdities. But to read it as such embraces the shadow, not the substance, of the author's purpose, which Margaret Earley Whitt has grasped and effectively illuminated in Understanding Flannery O'Connor.
O'Connor sought to bring before the reader, through literature of the moral imagination, the questions ``What about this Christ? What are we supposed to do with Him?''
A lifelong practicing Catholic, O'Connor knew the contradictions of Christ - madman or Son of God; fool or demon - well. To teach the modern teacher by addressing the permanent things - those timeless mores that individuals and society ignore at their peril - O'Connor employed caricature and distortion to make her point, writing, ``To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.'' And in her familiar ``Christ-haunted'' South, O'Connor found the people, manners and locale that would startle her readers.
But as Whitt notes, this is not to say that O'Connor was a closet theologian who spent her time trying to smuggle moralistic messages into her fiction. O'Connor's Christian and Southern world view - melding the tendency to hold fast to custom, convention and continuity with the propensity for judicious change - was fully and integrally a part of her, one that flowed into her novels and stories. Together, the manners of the South and the mystery of the Faith inform her writings, and knowing this is crucial to understanding O'Connor, as Whitt emphasizes.
In examining O'Connor's fiction, Whitt offers convincing, insightful interpretations of the novel Wise Blood and of such classic stories as ``Good Country People,'' ``The Displaced Person,'' ``Everything That Rises Must Converge'' and ``Parker's Back.'' Here Whitt helps the reader to see more clearly what these works are about and to enjoy them more fully, without viewing the fiction as puzzles to be unscrambled or codes to be deciphered.
Whitt is less convincing elsewhere when her reading of the fiction seems to stretch, but not quite get there. For example, at one point she opines that the name of the character Rayber in the novel The Violent Bear It Away is a corruption of the word ``rabbi,'' and that Lucette Carmody ``appears to have the ability to make others, like Rayber, spiritual Lucite.'' As I said, this is a stretch.
Along the way, the author offers a strong case, through judicious quotation, for reading O'Connor's collected essays, Mystery and Manners, and her collected letters, The Habit of Being, as vital to understanding the fiction as well as the intelligence that shines through them. A well-selected annotated bibliography of secondary sources is appended.
All said, Whitt ably demonstrates that O'Connor possessed the talent, sensitivity and discipline to write some of the most thought-provoking and (in its own peculiar way) enjoyable fiction in 20th-century American literature, successfully finding that ``peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.''
- MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a Virginia native who lives in Michigan, is the
editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Flannery O'Connor
by CNB