Joseph O’Neill, whose novel Netherland is this year’s recipient of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award, has written a piece on Flannery O’Connor for the recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly (using Brad Gooch’s biography, Flannery: A Life, as the occasion). O’Neill describes O’Connor’s writing as “unfairly” and “wickedly” good:
The narrating third person hovers in an almost miraculous fusion of proximity and comic distance. With O’Connor, there never seems to be space between the words and their creator’s sensibility. You almost never catch a whiff of authorial self-consciousness. About how many writers can this be said?
Nonetheless, O’Neill has problems with O’Connor the “exegesist.” In other words, O’Connor the Catholic:
To decode her fiction for its doctrinal or supernatural content is to render it dreary, even false, because whatever her private purposes, O’Connor was above all faithful to a baleful comic vision derived, surely, from an ancient, artistically wholesome tradition of misanthropy. Nonetheless, a spiritual drama is playing out. Only it is not the one put forward by the self-explaining author, in which she figures as an onlooker occupying the high ground of piety. On the contrary, Flannery O’Connor’s criticism reveals her as scarily belonging to the low world she evokes. She was touched by evil and no doubt knew it. That is what makes her so wickedly good.
O’Neill fears that reading O’Connor in light of her Catholicism reduces her artistic achievement, rendering it “dreary, even false.” This is common for current critics who find her writing rapturous, but her self-proclaimed “thirteenth century” Catholicism distasteful. Yet his own summation of O’Connor as nothing more than a deep-seated misanthropist, “belonging to the low world she evokes,” rather than a faithful Catholic looking into the heart of human mystery, strikes me as far drearier and less convincing than O’Connor’s own conviction that her faith was the driving force behind her art.
She wrote: “Because I am a Catholic I an afford to be nothing less than an artist.” O’Connor’s concentrated vision of the Fall is “baleful,” to be sure, but not without hope, as it would be in the work of a genuine misanthrope (Philip Roth, perhaps?). O’Connor’s stories feature characters unquestionably “touched by evil,” but O’Neill misses the larger point entirely. That they are also, and more importantly, “touched by grace.” That grace may be darkly comic, shocking, or violent, but it’s there. And it’s a mystery. O’Neill’s reading of O’Connor may reveal more about him than it does about his subject.
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