O’Connor as Catholic Writer

William Giraldi really doesn’t like being mistaken for a Catholic novelist. And he doesn’t much like Catholic novels of Graham Greene or of the later Walker Percy because they are too Catholic, too guided by dogma.

He does like Flannery O’Connor and even though he wants to retain a questionable gap between a Catholic storyteller and a Catholic who tells stories, he does capture O’Connor’s skill:

Again and again one is staggered by her alien abilities, her empyreal genius couched in that local strut through dirt and blood, her faith always hidden, even when she’s most vociferously expressing it. The fiction writer wears no vestments, and in her best stories and two novels, this is how O’Connor excels, as a kind of anti-­preacher of her quaking faith. Not only does her writer’s hand never partake of piety and homily, but it is outright raking in its criticism of indoctrination, of inherited formulations and blind believing, of ovine and backwoods behavior. Catholics and Pentecostals, agnostics and atheists, the sacred and the profane alike scamper through her devil’s world, and she reserves her harshest reproof for those like the preacher and the babysitter in her story ‘The River’: the pharisaical and sanctimonious, those polluting proselytizers and vile converters.

Grant that O’Connor skewers hypocrisy uncommonly well: But we might add that Jesus did too.

He adds, 

The Catholic O’Connor, in other words, has no Catholic agenda when she sits at the campfire to tell her story—across her singular canon all is chaos in search of grace, all is enigma unveiled but unsolved, and no credo is a clear victor. In her essay ‘The Church and the Fiction Writer,’ she asserts that the novelist’s ‘first concern will be the necessities that present themselves in the work,’ not in the doctrine of her religion. And in her essay ‘Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,’ she has this memorable bit every believing writer should tape to her desk: ‘When the Catholic novelist closes his own eyes and tries to see with the eyes of the Church, the result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.’

Grant that a writer needs to keep his eyes open, but would O’Connor be so naive to think that her faith didn’t affect her gaze? 

Nope. Giraldi’s summary of O’Connor’s theory of fiction is distortingly selective. Her essay on “The Catholic and the Fiction Writer” describes a “double vision” in the Catholic writer, the prophetic vision that is “the Church’s gift” and is “to us an extension of sight,” and a “purely individual vision” that needs to be “in full operation.” She knows that the “two sets of eyes” are in conflict, and she doesn’t want to resolve the conflict in either direction. She wants to raise the conflict to the forefront, to make it conscious. She certainly doesn’t claim she can disconnect her open eyes from the extension of vision that the church profits, and she wouldn’t want to if she could: “to try to disconnect faith from vision is to do violence to the whole personality, and the whole personality participates in the act of writing.”