Religion and Ethics Newsweekly: An Extended interview with Ralph Wood on Flannery O’Connor

Posted by Kendall Harmon

The assumption made by most of her readers in the early ’50s when she came into print was that here we have another H.L. Mencken, here we have another Sinclair Lewis, here we have a sophisticate, and above all a Catholic sophisticate, making fun of these dumb, backwoods, benighted, backward fundamentalists who are screaming “Jesus saves,” who are doing wild and hairy things like handling snakes and so forth, so she must be mocking, she must be having fun with them, she must be satirizing them in the fashion of Mencken or Sinclair Lewis. Of course, Mencken called the Bible the nastiest name he could think of, you know—not the Cotton Belt, not the Tobacco Belt, but the ugly word, the Bible Belt. And for O’Connor that was the glory of her region, these people, backwoods—not our contemporary fundamentalists, not those that have moved into political power. These were the emarginated people in the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places, never making it into the news, never wanting to get into the news, never trying to push political candidates forward, never using the Gospel for some so-called larger political end. They were, instead, obsessed with God’s own self-identification in the Jews and in Jesus and in the book that is that story of self-identification, and so she saw—look, these are my brothers and sisters, they are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated Gospel, a Gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them, I cannot dismiss them, and so she winds up saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically, and of course that just stunned her secular audience, as they couldn’t understand at all what she was trying to do, when she was saying I think, in fact, what St. Thomas says. She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess. There’s one and one only quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that’s the love of God. And in fact Thomas says you cannot love God moderately, you cannot love God in a kind of lukewarm fashion. We love God either absolutely or not at all. And she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • History • Poetry & Literature • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A. • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic

3 Comments
Posted November 24, 2009 at 6:00 am [Printer Friendly] [Print w/ comments]



1. Iohannes wrote:

Thanks for sharing this interview. It really is worth reading it all.

November 24, 7:23 am | [comment link]
2. Todd Granger wrote:

Magnificent.  I appreciate even Professor Wood’s Faulkneresque sentences (what non-Southerners might not appreciate, is that Faulkner’s famously long sentences reflect the way that many of us actually talk).

I will be reading this interview extract again and again.  As a native of the rural deep South (the pine-clad, red clay hills of central Louisiana and now a dweller in the similar geography of central North Carolina), O’Connor has always spoken to me.  The people about whom she writes are my people, these sacramentally-deficient, fiercely and radically God-loving folk Christians (what a better description than “fundamentalist”!).  When I read O’Connor, I find that I have either met, or heard a first-hand story about, or am related to most of her characters.  I know that hilly country road - I’ve driven it and walked it - they turned down in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”; or at least I’ve driven and walked down roads very like it.

What a writer - she is truly among the greats.

November 24, 4:28 pm | [comment link]
3. Fr. J. wrote:

I’ve been a Flannery lover for the last twenty-five years since I first read “Revelation” as a college freshman in Virginia.  I have had a practice of reading through about half her short stories each year during the course of Lent, and it is only recently that I have begun to really understand her—I think, just maybe.  I have come to think of her stories as a modern apocalyptic literature—necessarily cryptic in order to hide from her own people her deepest estimations of them.  As a Catholic in the South, one is always an outsider.  As one who has dwelt among the literary elite of New York for a time, her outsider’s perception only sharpened.  She was a jumble of exhilarating contradictions. 

I do not entirely agree with Ralph Wood, and I suspect he misreads her as most of her readers do.  A thoroughly Catholic reading of Flannery’s images reveals a very sharp criticism of Southern folk Christianity, though it is not without love and awe as well.  Getting so much of the essentials wrong, these Christians nevertheless are chastened and brought to Divine discipline precisely because God loves them.  Far from laughing at her people, she sees God constantly dragging, cajoling and exhorting them, like all sinners, step by step along the pilgrim way that leads back to him.

I have begun a series of posts on Flannery’s short stories from a Catholic point of view.  I have only managed 5 articles so far, but more are on the way.  The series is called Friday’s Flannery and appears in the blog, The Black Cordelias.  I am working on a new post which I hope to put up over Thanksgiving.  Whoever stops by, enjoy!

November 24, 6:52 pm | [comment link]
Registered members must log in to comment.



Next entry (above): The Economist Leader: Dealing with America's fiscal hole

Previous entry (below): Stephen King On a New Biography of Raymond Carver and a New Collection of Carver's Writings

Return to blog homepage

Return to Mobile view (headlines)