Flannery O’Connor’s Archive at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL)
Woodruff Library, Emory University. Atlanta, Georgia.
The last stop in my journey in the wake of Flannery O’Connor’s South is the Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL), in Atlanta, Georgia. The archive is one of the richest as far as the writer is concerned, as it owns hundreds of original letters and manuscripts written by Flannery O’Connor herself.
Recently, Emory University has acquired a handful of new material from the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust in Milledgeville, Georgia. Except for some photographs of the materials shared by the same Emory University’s MARBL — and here reproduced — it is not possible to have access to a digital version of the collection because of the strict copyright imposed by the trustee of Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, which owns the rights of all of O’Connor’s belongings.
Nonetheless, it is possible to visit MARBL archives at Emory University’s Woodruff Library and have access to the materials. Unlike the Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, where one can only look at photocopies of the material, the most interesting thing of this archive is that one is able to have direct access to the original copies of the manuscripts and the letters. Even if most of them are protected by transparent plastic envelopes so that the paper does not get ruined, it is possible to look at the very sheets of paper on which Flannery O’Connor wrote. And, for those people who are worshippers of everything that belonged to such respected and almost holy figures in the literary world, it is kind of a religious experience to be able to touch the very pages O’Connor wrote so many years ago.
When I visited the collection last week, I took a look at many of O’Connor’s letters, ranging from the early forties to the sixties, and at some of the manuscripts, among which two essays captured my attention because of their being directly related to the issues examined in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969). In “How the Writer Writes” and “The Problem of the Southern Writer,” O’Connor writes about what it means to be a regional — and in this case, Southern — writer and how the concrete reality that surrounds the writer affects its writing excatly because, according to her, this is the starting point of every fictional work.
Even though many of the prose she wrote when she was asked to speak at conferences and other public events are not available to the public, among the ideas and concepts that made it through the final versions of the essays published in Mystery and Manners, one can see how part of what O’Connor wrote in the original drafts of many of her writings has actually remained pretty similar to their first formulation as far as sentence structures and images are concerned. For example, in “How the Writer Writes,” she talks about the importance of the concrete in a writer’s work, and the same idea here expressed can be found in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” one of the essays collected in Mystery and Manners.
“[…] I want to talk about one of the quality of fiction which I think is its least common denominator — the fact that is 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 the same piece of writing, she then goes on to state what she thinks is the “most obvious characteristic of fiction,” a concept that the reader can find in the same exact words in another essay entitled “Writing Short-Stories.” As she sees it,
“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.”
In “The Problem of the Southern Writer,” O’Connor writes about the Southern writer’s relationship both to his geographic background and to his literary background. In doing so, she paid particular attention to the fact that because of the legacy of great writers as William Faulkner, the Southern writer has to carry an incredible burden, and, at the same time, he has to try and give a sense to this burden through the filter of his own artistic view. As William Sessions recalled, Flannery O’Connor had a great admiration for Faulkner, but at the same time she used to say that the Mississippian was like a train, the Dixie Limited, which was liable of destroying everything that was on its path. The same idea can be found in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” where O’Connor writes that
“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.”
Therefore, while the Southern writer has to find his inspiration in the reality of his country in order to create his fictional world, at the same time he has to be aware of the fact that just following in the steps of the great writers of the past is not enough. Being highly aware of this, Flannery O’Connor was able to write works of fiction that, while using the South as a starting point and a source for inspiration, succeeded in creating fictional worlds in which her voice and style are recognizable as peculiar and unique.
For further information about the acquisition of Flannery O’Connor’s belongings by Emory University’s MARBL and photographs of the materials, here are some links to online newspaper articles:
