Early this year, Martin Scorsese and Bruce Springsteen bonded over an unlikely shared interest in Flannery O’Connor, the Southern Gothic writer known for her depictions of the grotesque. Scorsese urged Springsteen to read her letters “just a few pages a night, every few nights.”
Springsteen noted that O’Connor inspired his album Nebraska, and he added, “If you’re an artist, that darkness is always more interesting than the light. It’s nice when you let the light in at the end of something. But I was always interested in, what were the things that didn’t go right?”
If O’Connor is known for anything, it’s the darkness. Her storylines are often macabre, sometimes punctuated by a moment of grace. She wrestled with the extraordinary and the ordinary, both “mystery and manners,” as she wrote in her nonfiction book of that title.
“She’s trying to be a ‘realist of distances.’ That’s her word,” says Jessica Hooten Wilson, who is a professor of literature at John Brown University and the authorized custodian of O’Connor’s last incomplete manuscript. “She’s trying to see things far off as though they’re up close.”
Most readers know O’Connor from her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” but her influence extends beyond her short fiction and the letters that fascinate Scorsese. Her last unfinished manuscript has yet to be published, but Wilson hopes to change that in the next couple of years.
Before O’Connor died in 1964, she began Why Do the Heathen Rage?, a novel that wrestles with pride, race, and faith. In it, a Southern pseudo-intellectual white man, Walter Tilman, corresponds with a white, female civil rights activist, Oona Gibbs, in New York. O’Connor, who came from a white, well-to-do Southern family, often criticized fellow Southerners for their racism, which is one of the subjects of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Walter lets his intellect stoke his arrogance, which is typical for O’Connor characters, such as the philosophical atheist in “Good Country People.”
Wilson explains, “He writes letters as a way of flexing his intellectual muscle over other people.”
Oona has her own struggles with authenticity, seeking to do good but perhaps not for the right reasons.
In his letters, Walter tests her by pretending to be black. Wilson explains, “He says, ‘If you actually saw me in real life, you wouldn’t love me the way you think you would love me.’ So she heads that direction.”
Wilson has been working to sift through the novel’s 370-plus pages of notes and rewritten scenes for several years, and she hopes to publish it after 2020, pending approval from O’Connor’s estate. In the end, Wilson plans to present not a completed manuscript, but “an unfinished piece of a Flannery O’Connor novel.”
It might seem a shame that the unfinished book wasn’t published in the ’60s, at the end of the civil rights movement, but Wilson argues that the delay might be a good thing.
She asked a friend involved in the Black Lives Matter movement to look at the manuscript, and he thought it could be more significant now than it would have been 50 years ago.
The themes are universal, “especially people pretending to be who they’re not, and people using others for pawns even when they think it’s toward a positive end,” Wilson says. “For example, the civil rights activist character from New York doesn’t seem to love people maybe as much as she is exploiting them so she can feel like a white savior.”
Wilson also draws parallels from the book to the way we now use social media to present images of ourselves. O’Connor’s strongest theme emerges in one of her most universal, frequent targets: pride.
“The last few years of her life, she does write stories that are dealing more with what’s going on with the civil rights movement,” Wilson says. “She is looking at the sin of pride that is connected with racism and the inability to see other people as they are — for O’Connor, made in the image of God.”
C.S. Lewis said that pride “has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.” It is difficult to treat successfully in literature because readers tend to not to identify with prideful characters. But O’Connor manages to present them with enough nuance to overcome this problem, and she knows she cannot write of pride without turning inward and revealing the sin in herself.
“O’Connor writes about herself in such a way that she attacks herself and not just other people,” Wilson says. “So when it comes to race relations, I think one of the most helpful truths you can glean from O’Connor’s work would be to start by looking at one’s own reflection. And — I don’t even know if I would say it that way. I would say: have someone else’s eyes by which to see yourself.”
O’Connor employs this method in another story involving racism, the title of which would get her blacklisted today. Despite its startling name, “The Artificial N—–” condemns racism, rather than embracing it.
When the racist main character sees himself through the eyes of a black statuette in someone’s yard, he “recognizes his complicity in the suffering of the people that he has disdained,” Wilson explains.
“It is a really powerful moment; it could not have happened by him looking in the mirror. But by seeing the racism in that statue — and almost the statue becomes an icon — that’s how change happens,” she adds.
“We as human beings have a tendency to point outwards, to say the problem is out there, the problem is this tribe,” Wilson says. “Flannery is always trying to point back at the person and trying to get them to see through her fiction that I am the problem, the beginning of the problem.”
Some readers are confused by O’Connor’s drastic means to emphasize her narrative, and in an era of “cancel culture,” the problem will probably get worse. Author Joyce Carol Oates recently lamented that a friend had chosen the story for an anthology, “but publishers refused it on the grounds of an ‘offensive’ title.” It was “futile to explain that O’Connor was excoriating racism, not promoting it.”
On the subject of whether she’d be acceptable to modern critics, O’Connor might repeat her famous adage, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” There are, however, still people eager to share O’Connor’s work. Filmmakers who created a documentary on her life just won a grant from the Library of Congress this month.
But what about people who would misinterpret her work? Is O’Connor’s meaning too jarring? Perhaps the burden of interpretation lies with readers.
“People don’t know how to read these days,” Wilson argues. “People read standing over stories, and they try to pull out what they want from them rather than learn from them. In O’Connor’s work, if you stand over her fiction and try to pull things out, you probably are not going to find a whole lot there that is worthwhile.”
Understanding O’Connor’s fiction requires working through it slowly, adopting its premises before deciding whether or not they stand on their own.
O’Connor’s work is, of course, difficult to read; that may be part of what makes it so universal and influential, as both Scorsese and Springsteen attest. Reading her work may help us understand our present moment better than current literature, which can be myopically attentive to the here and now.
O’Connor’s stories achieve more universal aims, but only for those who are willing to pay attention.
“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic,” O’Connor once wrote. “It is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
Madeline Fry is a commentary writer at the Washington Examiner.
