Flannery O’Connor and the South
Looking Back on a Journey Through Space and Literature
“Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
When I was facing the task of choosing a topic for this project — something that was going to be at least “seemingly southern” — I had no idea where to start, as I was looking at the South of the United States as a foreigner would do. There was only one thing that I knew for sure: that I wanted it to be about literature. Thinking about Southern literature as a whole — or thinking about the meaning of this particular category of American literature, or its boundaries and its characteristics — was an impossible task. The first thing to do, then, was to contain the subject, and in order to do so, I made the decision of focusing on the country I was currently living in, Georgia, and on one Georgian author, Flannery O’Connor.
In order to put this topic in relation to the South as a whole, my approach to O’Connor’s life and work was guided by the intention of looking for clues that would have enlightened the ways in which her Georgian — and therefore Southern — origins and background have influenced her poetic views. This is why my journey has been first of all a physical journey through Georgia. During my wanderings around the country I visited many places that are connected to Flannery O’Connor’s life and heritage: from Flannery O’Connor’s Childhood Home in Savannah, to Andalusia Farm in Milledgeville; from Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, to Flannery O’Connor’s Archive at the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Library at Emory University, in Atlanta.
In each of the houses where she lived, I learned something about Mary Flannery the child and the woman — her early love for books; her childhood interest in birds and, above all, peacocks; the strength with which she faced her disease for so many years. In the archives, I had the chance to look at O’Connor as a writer, and see how her ideas have changed and developed over the years. Given the purpose of my project, it has been incredibly useful to see with my own eyes the places she inhabited, and read her letters and her manuscripts, as, thanks to this experience, I was able to understand her approach to fiction — an approach that, as I discovered, is deeply rooted in her reality. Even though it is not possible to read a writer’s work as entirely deriving from or being related to a writer’s life experience, bits and pieces of the writer’s reality — his background, his relations, and so on — can still be seen between the lines of his works.
This is especially true as far as literary influences are concerned, as culture is a big part of an author’s background. For a Southern writer as O’Connor was, this relationship with the country she lived in and the culture she breathed in also meant that there was an obstacle that was almost impossible to ignore, but difficult to overcome. William Faulkner, who is considered the master of Southern literature, has set such a high standard with his work that it is believed an incredibly difficult task to write something that both avoids being Faulknerian and accomplishes something new. As Flannery O’Connor herself wrote in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,”
“The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
When I interviewed William Sessions, former professor at Georgia State University and — more importantly — an old friend of Flannery O’Connor, he told me that Faulkner was very important to O’Connor, since she had taken the whole idea of becoming a writer from Faulkner himself. On the other hand, though, she was also one of those writers that have been able to develop their own distinctive voices and make them be heard both because of and in spite of William Faulkner. One of the most important differences between the two is that, unlike Faulkner, who believed that the South and its history are almost impossible to understand — no matter how hard one tries to put the pieces together –, O’Connor thought that direct observation of the reality through the senses was the starting point for her fiction.
This is why I decided to focus on Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, a collection of her lectures and essays published in 1969 in which she expressed her ideas about writers and writing — especially Southern writers and writing in and about the South. By going through this volume, it is possible to understand in which ways the context in which a writer lives affects his own ideas about writing and his fictional narratives. Indeed, one of the first things that strikes the attention of the reader is that O’Connor herself underlines pretty clearly the link between the real and the fictional world. In “The Nature and the Aim of Fiction,” she writes that she wants to
“[…] talk about one of the quality of fiction which I think is its least common denominator — the fact that it is concrete […]. We will be concerned in this with the reader in his fundamental human sense, because the nature of fiction is in large measure determined by the nature of our perceptive apparatus. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the sense, and you cannot appeal to the sense with abstractions.”
In O’Connor’s writings one can easily see how much attention she paid to the human senses: from the sometimes brief but precise physical descriptions of characters and places, to the way in which she managed to bring smells and sounds to the nose and the ears of every reader, her narratives have plenty in common with the reality she knew. It is not surprising, then, that in “Writing Short Stories,” she wrote that
“The first and the most obvious characteristic of fiction is that it deals with reality through what can be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, and touched.”
And it is through the senses that she perceives Southern reality. As she wrote in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” she believed that
“The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affects us long before we believe anything at all. The South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another. He takes it in through his ears and hears it again in his own voice, and, by the time he is able to use his imagination for fiction, he finds that his senses respond irrevocably to a certain reality, and particularly to the sound of a certain reality.”
As William Sessions sees it, it is not possible to read all of O’Connor’s fiction in the light of her life and experience in the South. At the same time, though, one has to be aware that O’Connor’s background is important in other ways, especially because that is where she starts:
“She starts from the specific […] and then she moves through language. What makes Flannery is her language. And O’Connor had a real sense of keeping her language, her story, her fiction, going, no matter how painful it was.”
Indeed, this is exactly what O’Connor does: she finds inspiration in her surroundings, and makes this the basis of her stories, but at the same time she is able to mix her personal life experience — her disease, her religion, her isolation — with the culture she grew up in — that of a region, the South, hunted by war, death, Christ — in order to create something new and peculiar. To say it as she wrote it in “The Fiction Writer and His Country,”
“When we talk about the writer’s country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world. The writer’s value is lost, both to himself and to his country, as soon as he ceases to see that country as a part of himself, and to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.”
As William Sessions put it, “What she did was using the culture for her own needs,” that is to say to express her own ideas not only about the South where she had been born and where she lived practically all her life, but about human beings and what goes on inside their hearts and their minds. In other words, she did not only write about the South, she used it in order to write, and in order to make her stories feel universal. Being highly aware of the fact that the reality that surrounded her was the source of inspiration for her fiction, Flannery O’Connor was able to write works of fiction that, while using the South as a starting point and a source of inspiration, succeeded in creating fictional worlds in which her voice and style are recognizable as unique.
