The Art of Flannery O’Connor

by Michael M. Jordan

Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South
by Ralph C. Wood.

The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor
by Christina Bieber Lake.

Flannery O’Connor continues to interest many readers and critics. A slow and painstaking writer who died young (of lupus at age 39), she did not produce a large body of literature, but what she did produce (in three genres: letters, literary criticism, and fiction) is superlative. Her letters, collected primarily in The Habit of Being, are delightful and witty, penetrating and powerful. They reveal a bright and cheerful soul, a remarkable judge of human nature and the literary arts, and an effective apologist for Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic faith. Her essays and lectures in literary criticism, collected in Mystery and Manners, offer exceptionally insightful and clearly stated judgments on life and literature. O’Connor is perceptive and profound in her remarks on region, realism, the grotesque, the imagination, human nature, and the human and artistic limitations that make literature great as well as the difficulties facing a Christian novelist writing for an unbelieving audience—or audiences that are merely superficial or sentimental believers. 

Just as O’Connor excels in the arts of letter writing and literary criticism, she also excels in her fiction (two novels and thirty-one short stories). Manifesting her integrity, the fiction incarnates the same vision of human nature, modern aberrations, and divine grace and judgment that she discusses in her letters and criticism. She wrote remarkably well-crafted stories with depth upon depth of meaning (some claim that she’s America’s best twentieth-century writer of short stories), and her prophetic fiction challenges the liberal, gnostic, nihilistic, and secular assumptions of the modern world. She is a writer to be reckoned with, and critics by the hundreds are attracted to her work: The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States notes that “O’Connor attracts the critical attention of more scholars each year than any other twentieth-century American woman writer.” Another indication of O’Connor’s stature is The Library of America edition of her Collected Works.

Because of O’Connor’s stature, it is no surprise that Ralph Wood and Christina Bieber Lake have presented books on her fiction. It is fortunate as well, for O’Connor’s readers do often need a guide to her fiction, and not all guides can be trusted. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, examines O’Connor’s Christ-haunted fiction in connection with the religion and culture of the American South; he explores her work and the region’s ecclesiastical and cultural milieu, dealing with pertinent works of religious sociology and history, and with a host of past and current scholarly studies of O’Connor and her work. His premise is that the South’s history of slavery produced “the greatest historical guilt of any American region,” and that while the South lost the War Between the States, it “won the spiritual war by retaining its truest legacy, not the heritage of slavery and segregation and discrimination, but the Bible-centered and Christ-haunted faith that it still bequeaths to the churches and the nations as their last, best, and only true hope.” O’Connor’s fiction, with its Bible-centered and Christ-haunted backdrop, and the very clear embrace of the Christian gospel evident in her letters and essays, is central to Wood’s hopeful thesis.

The Spaciousness of the Old Rhetoric

This paper was originally presented to The Philadelphia Society conference on The Ethics of Rhetoric in a Digital Age held in Atlanta, Georgia, September 25, 2010. Presented here with permission of the author. Micheal Jordan is Chairman of the English Department, Hillsdale College.

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The Spaciousness of Old Rhetoric By Michael Jordan

 In his autobiography The Education of Henry Adams, Adams tells us that he was born into one world in the nineteenth century and lived on into another.  Born in Quincy, Massachusetts in 1838, he lived to see a new world in the twentieth century-- a world in which a secular Dynamo has replaced Venus and the Virgin, two manifestations of the transcendent that once animated and energized Western culture—Venus a cultural force in the pagan world, the Virgin in Christendom.  Historian Adams saw unity, harmony, and beauty in that older world, but multiplicity, fragmentation, chaos, skepticism, and confusion in the new.  Likewise, the old world was an orderly and beautiful creation, for the poet and the scientist; the new, merely colliding atoms, matter in motion, “a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces” (The Education of Henry Adams 289).

Richard Weaver

Adams’ account of the past and the present is reflected in Richard Weaver’s work.  Both admire the old, ordered world, with its distinction and hierarchy, its grand cathedrals, and the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas.  Adams was alarmed by the scientific and technological god of the new age, the Dynamo; Weaver by its offspring: the “gods of mass and speed” (Ideas Have Consequences vi).  For our purposes, what is most remarkable is that both writers emphasize a Great Divide or demarcation between two worlds: the older, more ordered world of nineteenth-century America, and the more fragmented and uncertain America of the twentieth century.  While Weaver sees the beginning of the end of that old world in the rise of Nominalism in the fourteenth century, he still sees in mid-nineteenth century America a relatively ordered and humane world.  Let us look at Weaver’s essay “The Spaciousness of the Old Rhetoric” to see what light it sheds on these two worlds,  especially what the old world had and the new world lost.

            This essay from Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) analyzes the rhetoric of America’s 19^th century orators.  We have forgotten most of these orators as well as the occasions on which they spoke: Andrew Ewing in 1850 on the sale of public lands, Charles Faulkner in 1858 on the virtues of agrarianism at a Virginia agricultural fair, John C. Breckinridge (Vice President of the United States) in 1859 on the occasion of the Senate’s move from the Old to the New Chamber, Rufas Choate in 1845 addressing the Law School in Cambridge on the American Bar association’s essentially conservative function.  Weaver also mentions Lincoln’s First and Second Inaugurals and the Gettysburg address--the only orator and oratorical occasions most of us will remember. 

Examining these orations, Weaver finds what he calls “Spaciousness.”  This term designates a “’high-flown’” quality (165), a “grand style” full of both “historical and literary” resonances (169); a “freedom of purview” that allows the orator to speak with conviction on principles and beliefs held in common with his audience (173); an “aesthetic distance” and decorum that envisioned the whole and did not trespass into crude familiarity, minute details, impertinent particulars, and obscene spectacles (175-177); a belief in “non-factual kinds of truth” (182); and a “polite style” that  “’sounds good’” and respects “the powers and limitations of the audience” ( 184).