Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Georgia College and State University
“The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all, and the South impresses its imag on us from the moment we are able to distinguish one sound from another. By the time we are able to use our imaginations for fiction, we find that our senses have responded irrevocably to a certain reality. This discovery of being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom, is for the writer the beginning of a recognition that first puts his work into real human perspective for him.”
Flannery O’Connor, The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South
Flannery O’Connor’s Collection at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, Georgia — the same university that Flannery O’Connor attended when it was still the Georgia State College for Women— collects a wide range of the writer’s personal belongings: from the books of her personal library, which where once in Andalusia Farm, in Milledgeville, to one of her typewriter; from her yearbooks to some of her paintings; from various copies of her works in different languages to the desk she used to draw her cartoons on. The most interesting part of the collection is certainly that in which are gathered Flannery O’Connor’s manuscripts. Unfortunately, given to restrictions to the copyright, none of this materials can be reproduced, but it is possible to have access to it for academic purpose, as long as none of what one reads will then be reproduced without consent.
During my visit in the archive, I had the chance to go through a couple of manuscripts, especially two drafts related to “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” which allowed me to see how O’Connor’s writings changed and developed over the years. In particular, the first draft was from a lecture on Southern writers O’Connor gave to a Women’s Club in Macon in 1955, while the second was from a lecture on the Georgia writer and his country that she gave to an audience of English teachers in 1960. In both these manuscripts it is possible to recognize the core ideas that will then figure in various essays which have been published in their final version in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose in 1969.
Most of the crucial ideas that are present in these two manuscripts have later been revised, elaborated in other forms, and ended up being included in other essays of the same volume — and not only in the one that still bears the title “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” It is interesting to notice, tough, that the fundamental idea remains pretty much the same notwithstanding the changes. The reader can clearly see at the center of the essays the question of how, when it comes to represent a particular kind of world, a writer naturally directs his or her attention to his or her surroundings, that is to say, to the region he or she lives in. In a passage that pretty much resembles the first formulation of this idea, O’Connors writes about this issue in these terms:
“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.”
Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (1969).
