Flannery O'Connor was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the Library of America, the definitive edition of American authors. Fifty years after her death, O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those who know nothing of O'Connor and her work, this study by Ralph C. Wood offers one of the finest introductions available. For those looking to deepen their appreciation of this literary icon, it breaks important new ground. Unique to Wood's approach is his concern to show how O'Connor's stories, novels, and essays impinge on America's cultural and ecclesial condition. He uses O'Connor's work as a window onto its own regional and religious ethos. Indeed, he argues here that O'Connor's fiction has lasting, even universal, significance precisely because it is rooted in the confessional witness of her Roman Catholicism and in the Christ-haunted character of the American South. According to Wood, it is this O'Connor -- the believer and the Southerner -- who helps us at once to confront the hardest cultural questions and to propose the profoundest religious answers to them. His book is thus far more than a critical analysis of O'Connor's writing; in fact, it is principally devoted to cultural and theological criticism by way of O'Connor's searing insights into our time and place. These are some of the engaging moral and religious questions that Wood explores: the role of religious fundamentalism in American culture and in relation to both Protestant liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the practice of racial slavery and its continuing legacy in the literature and religion of the South; the debate over Southern identity, especially whether it is a culture rooted in ancient or modern values; the place of preaching and the sacraments in secular society and dying Christendom; and the lure of nihilism in contemporary American culture. Splendidly illuminating both O'Connor herself and the American mind, Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ- Haunted South will inform and fascinate a wide range of readers, from lovers of literature to those seriously engaged with religious history, cultural analysis, or the American South.

Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South

By Ralph C. Wood

Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2005 Ralph C. Wood
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780802829993

Chapter One

A Roman Catholic at Home in the Fundamentalist South

Speaking magisterially for her fellow Catholics in the American South,Flannery O'Connor offered a startling prophecy at the close of a 1959 bookreview: "It is an embarrassment to our fundamentalist neighbors," she wrote,"to realize that they are doctrinally nearer their traditional enemy, theChurch of Rome, than they are to modern Protestantism. The day may comewhen Catholics will be the ones who maintain the spiritual traditions of theSouth." It has become commonplace to note O'Connor's affinity with herSouthern backwoods prophets and preachers, though her early critics assumed,quite wrongly, that she was making literary sport of them. Yet no onehas explored the real depth of this kinship. Robert Brinkmeyer has arguedthat, while O'Connor's narrators assume a fundamentalist tone, she herselfmaintains a serene Catholic stance above them. It is not difficult to understandBrinkmeyer's embarrassment, his unwillingness to admit that O'Connor'stough narrative voice is really hers.

Brinkmeyer is not alone in finding it difficult to grant cultural standingto fundamentalism. The liberal Protestant theologian H. Richard Niebuhr, inhis 1929 analysis of American Christianity, devoted only three pages to fundamentalists.In standard Weberian fashion, he attributed the primitive qualityof their faith to their agrarian existence:

In recent times the conflict between urban and rural religion took on dramatic form in the theological battles of Modernism and Fundamentalism. ... [T]he religion of the primitive agriculturalist is inclined to magic, to the compulsive spell upon the powers of nature on which the rural worker is so dependent for his whole economic existence.... Hence the faith of the rural community centers more in the appropriation of the grace of God that men may live in harmony with Him, while urban religion is more concerned with the gain of that same grace that men may live at peace with one another.

George Marsden has shown that American fundamentalism is, in fact,an urban rather than a rural phenomenon, that its conflict with modernismarose in the North rather than the South, and that it was birthed by legitimateconcerns over scientific and historical challenges to the main claims ofChristian faith. This is not to deny that most revivalistic Methodists andBaptists and Pentecostals living in the rural South during the publishingyears of O'Connor's life (1948-64) were also fundamentalists. They, too, heldthat the Bible is God's verbally inspired, inerrant, infallible book - not onlyin matters of faith and morals, but of history and science as well. Yet theirbiblical literalism was taken for granted rather than pitted against an allegedenemy. Marsden wittily notes, therefore, that to speak of most SouthernChristians as fundamentalists was to indulge in redundancy. There was noneed to give them the name, since the South remained largely immune to theangry battles that racked the Northern churches.

Once the warfare ended with an overwhelming modernist triumph,fundamentalism came to be regarded as the worst of abominations. In highacademic and ecclesial places, whether Catholic or Protestant, its adherentshave been dismissed as rigid and narrow, as mean-spirited and closed-mindedfolks who bludgeon their enemies with their Bible. Most scholarsand critics see themselves, by contrast, as enlightened and compassionate, asinclusive and diversity-desiring people. We thus give thanks that we are notlike the fundamentalists, the one group whom everyone can despise withoutguilt. Many liberal Protestants, by contrast, regard the Bible as a classic workof religious literature, one sacred text among other kindred books, the Western equivalent of the Muslim's Koran or the Hindu's Gita. Why, then, wouldO'Connor cast her allegiance with the old-line Southern fundamentalistsrather than the up-to-date liberals?

The American Way of Life: Materialist Individualism

The answer lies, at least in part, in the 1950s cultural circumstance ofO'Connor's work. Jon Lance Bacon has shown that O'Connor's faith and artwere not solely fixed on transtemporal truths, but that she was deeply concernedabout the homogenizing ethos of the Eisenhower era. It was a timerife with anti-Communism and pro-Americanism. "The American Way ofLife" became the talismanic phrase for hailing all that was virtuous about oursystem of government and for damning all competing systems. It was thefirst American age to witness the triumph of the automobile and advertising,of consumerism and suburbanism. The chief demand of this new era was forindividual conformity and "adjustment" to fit the demands of the emergingconsensus in both politics and religion. O'Connor was openly allied withother critics of this consumer-centered call for conformity and homogeneity:C. Wright Mills and Marshall McLuhan, David Riesman and VancePackard, William H. Whyte and Reinhold Niebuhr. They all saw that the rampantnew commercialism and commodification of American life obliterated"the possibility of some other reality than the material."

O'Connor protested against the postwar attempt to baptize individualistself-sufficiency and materialist well-being in the name of sentimental uplift.In a 1957 essay she declared that "there is some ugly correlation betweenour unparalleled prosperity and the stridency of these demands for a literaturethat shows us the joys of life." She also asked whether "these screams forjoy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperoussociety" (MM, 30). Raising her voice as a bullhorn against thetrumpetings of middle-class contentedness, O'Connor insisted that "Catholicismis opposed to the bourgeois mind," while also praising her own favoriteart form, the grotesque, as the "true anti-bourgeois style" (CW, 862). In hervery first novel, Wise Blood (1952), her protagonist is a hayseed rather than asuburbanite, but he announces the new American gospel with consummatecomplacency: "Nobody with a good car," declares Hazel Motes, "needs to bejustified" by Jesus (CW, 64). Motes's broken-down Essex is indeed his deity:he sleeps in it, preaches from it, and relies on it to escape from all obligationsthat are not of his own choosing.

Among O'Connor's many satiric portraits of the bitch-goddess - asD. H. Lawrence called the deity of bourgeois success - none is more acutethan the figure of a copper flue salesman named Meeks in her second novel,The Violent Bear It Away. Meeks is an apostle of hard work, extolling it not as anintrinsic good but as the way to get ahead:

He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbor. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. (CW, 365)

Meeks has also mastered the art of salesmanship by way of feigned concernfor his customers. In his cornpone espousal of the utilitarian creed, Meeksalso reveals the nihilism lurking beneath it:

He said love was the only policy that worked 95% of the time. He said when he went to sell a man a flue, he asked first about that man's wife's health and how his children were. He said he had a book that he kept the names of his customers' families in and what was wrong with them. A man's wife had cancer, he put her name down in the book and wrote cancer after it and inquired about her every time he went to that man's hardware store until she died; then he scratched out the word cancer and wrote dead there. "And I say thank God when they're dead," the salesman said; "that's one less to remember." (CW, 362)

While O'Connor joined the 1950s liberal critique of American materialism,She was not deluded about the genuine threat posed by Communism. Yetshe was hardly a McCarthyite, confessing that the death camps could havebeen constructed in her own native Georgia as readily as in far-off Poland. Inher story "The Displaced Person," a Polish refugee is in fact slain by the samesort of "good country people" who operated Hitler's ovens. Yet O'Connor refusedto sell her work to Czech and Polish publishers in 1956, vowing to keep itout of "Russian-occupied territory" for fear that it might be used for propagandapurposes, as had the fiction of Jack London. She was also a close friendof Granville Hicks, the anti-Communist editor of Saturday Review, and shejoined with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick in seeking to oust an allegedCommunist, Agnes Smedly, as director of the writer's retreat at Yaddo inupstate New York. More revealing still is O'Connor's high regard for ReinholdNiebuhr, the American theologian whose understanding of human evil madehim a fierce critic of Communism. O'Connor joined Niebuhr, not only in hiscritique of American economic and intellectual smugness, but also in his denunciationof Stalin's desire to remake the whole of humanity into homoSovieticus, a creature whose abject political conformities made bourgeoisAmericanism seem, by comparison, to be liberating indeed.

The American Way of Faith: Civil Religion

O'Connor's critical independence - her unwillingness to equate Christianitywith any scheme or program - led her to reject another consensus thatshe regarded as far more noxious than bourgeois prosperity and anti-Communist hysteria: the newly emerging American civil religion. Its intentionswere no doubt good. As the sociologist Will Herberg argued in his influential1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, various representatives from thenation's historic faiths joined in an effort to combat ethnic and racial discrimination.United in their opposition to bigotry in all its forms, they agreedto ignore their fundamental theological differences for the sake of a commonneed. The cause of social justice came to be defined, however, as a larger goodthan the historic traditions themselves. Thus was the old civil religion ofWashington and Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers reshaped into anew Americanism that could suffice quite well without any confessional particularitiesat all.

The assumption underlying the view shared by most Americans, at least at moments when they think in "non-sectarian" terms, is not so much that the three religious communities possess an underlying theological unity, which of course they do, but rather that they are three diverse representations of the same "spiritual values," the "spiritual values" American democracy is presumed to stand for (the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, the dignity of the individual human being, etc.). That is, at bottom, why no one is expected to change his religion as he becomes American; since each of the religions is equally and authentically American, the American is expected to express his religious affirmation in that form which has come to him with his family and ethnic heritage. Particular denominational affiliations and loyalties within each of the communities ... are not necessarily denied, or even depreciated, but they are held to be distinctly secondary.

"Each of the religions is equally and authentically American" - therecould hardly be a clearer articulation of American civil religion: we are firstof all Americans, and only secondarily are we Jews or Muslims, Protestantsor Catholics or Orthodox. O'Connor discerned that something deadly hadoccurred when national identity had been made to trump religious faith. Sheproved to be recalcitrantly unpluralistic, therefore, at a gathering of eminentscholars, theologians, and writers at Sweet Briar College in 1963, which includedFranz Boas, Stanley Romaine Hopper, and John Ciardi. "The Devilhad his day" at this conference, O'Connor lamented, because the participantsall sought to reduce specific religious doctrines to general human possibilities."I waded in," O'Connor wrote to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, "and gavethem a nasty dose of orthodoxy.... I told them that when Emerson decidedin 1832 that he could no longer celebrate the Lord's supper unless the breadand wine were removed that an important step in the vaporization of religionin America had taken place" (CW, 1180).

O'Connor's objection to a blithe indifferentism concerning truth anderror, to an all-tolerant notion that one church or synagogue or mosque is asgood as another, to a reduction of doctrinal and communal faith to uncriticalmoral earnestness, was also voiced by the Jesuit Gustave Weigel in a debatewith the liberal Protestant Robert McAfee Brown: "The average Protestantseems to think it makes little difference what you believe so long as you aredecent and virtuous. About the only faith he seems to demand is the one impliedin the sincere effort to do the right thing." Whenever the choice lay between vaporized liberalism and hidebound fundamentalism, O'Connorchose fundamentalism, as we shall see. She heartily agreed with the Presbyteriantheologian Hugh T. Kerr, who once said that it is easier to cool downzealots than to warm up corpses.

Not only did the civil religion of the 1950s melt particularized historicfaiths into a thin religious gruel; it also made even the most secular Americansinto allegedly religious people. As President Dwight D. Eisenhoweronce declared, "Our government makes no sense ... unless it is founded in adeeply felt religious faith - and I don't care what it is." Once the substanceof "faith" no longer needs to be specified, as long as it is "deeply felt," then thepublic atheist has no more function and virtually vanishes from the Americanscene. In 1954, the phrase "under God" was added to the pledge of allegianceto the American flag, making atheists such as Robert Ingersoll andClarence Darrow and H. L. Mencken seem like irrelevant figures from the remotepast. Flannery O'Connor was not alone in sensing that something hadgone profoundly wrong; so did her fellow Catholic and fellow novelistWalker Percy. Writing amidst the mushrooming American religiosity of the1950s, Percy has his narrator and protagonist Binx Bolling confess his vexationthat his own groping quest for God is out of kilter with the boosterish religiosityanimating the great preponderance of Americans:

As everyone knows [declares Bolling], the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics - which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker....



Continues...

Excerpted from Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted Southby Ralph C. Wood Copyright © 2005 by Ralph C. Wood. Excerpted by permission.
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