University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, North America English Language and Literature 1971 The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor Leon V. Driskell University of Louisville Joan T. Brittain Bellarmine- Ursuline College Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Driskell, Leon V. and Brittain, Joan T., "The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor" (1971). Literature in English, North America. 24. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/24 The Eternal Crossroads This page intentionally left blank The Eternal Crossroads 1he Art of FLANNERY O'CONNOR Leon V. Drisl~ell & Joan T. Brittain The University Press o/ Kentucky ISBN 978-0-8131-5202-8 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 70-132828 Copyright© 1971 by The University Press of Kentucky A statewide cooperative scholarly publishing agency serving Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, Kentucky State College, Morehead State University, Murray State University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506 To Sue & to Bill This page intentionally left blank To Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) In August light, she began her night. Closing her eyes, she let in the dark Where light had burned so bright. She left a legacy of burning rays, Darkly to light the works of days. If for her some welcome darkness Came at last when she died, We remain now in her greater light, Ears dazzled by the Word she cried, Eyes opened to let in the dark. For now, a dark line of trees shivers And moves, and we, like blind men cured, See not trees hut men, and they dance The joy of a world of blind men cured, As the bush quivers, kindles, flames. Her vision burns our virtues clean. Out of darkness comes a burning light To burn clean our eyes for the night With signs of Grace in multiple eyes Of spreading peacock tails, or in one Glowing eye of the ever-constant sun, Ivory-soft as the elevated Host, But soaked in sunset blood. Her darkness is the only light. L. V. D. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments xi Preface xiii CHAPTER ONE The Eternal Crossroads CHAPTER TWO Specific In~uences: Mauriac, Hawthorne, & West I4 CHAPTER THREE 'Wise Blood' & What Came Before 33 CHAPTER FOUR The Expanded Vision: From the Tower of Babel to Vicarious Atonement 59 CHAPTER FIVE A Second Navel & Related Stories 8I CHAPTER SIX The Posthumous Collection I04 Notes I47 Bibliography I 5 I This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments We are grateful to the Graduate Dean of the University of Louisville and to the Academic Dean of Bellarrnine College for typing funds. We also thank Torn Kimmel and Fred Milne for patient and conscientious library assistance and Judy Cook and Rachel Thompson for typing. Portions of this book have previously appeared in Renascence, Georgia Review, Explicator, and Bulletin of Bibliography. "To Flan­ nery O'Connor (I925-I964)'' is reprinted by permission of South­ ern Humanities Review. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to reprint: FARRAR, STRAUS & cmoux, INC., for extracts from works by Flannery O'Connor-Wise Blood, copyright© I952 by Flannery O'Connor; The Violent Bear It Away, copyright © I96o by Flannery O'Connor; Everything That Rises Must Converge, copyright© I965 by the Estate of Mary Flan­ nery O'Connor; Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occa­ sional Prose, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, copy­ right© I957, I96I, I963, I964, I966, I967, I969 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O'Connor, copyright © I 962 by Flannery O'Connor, copyright© I96I by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc.; and for extracts from Franc;ois Mauriac, The Weakling and The Enemy, English translation copyright © I952 by Pellegrini and Cudahy, Inc.; HAR­ COURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, INC., for extracts from Flannery O'Con­ nor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, copyright © I953, I954, I955 by Flannery O'Connor; HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC., for extracts from T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909-r962; HARPER & ROW, INC., for extracts from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, English translation copyright© 1964 by Harper & Row, Inc.; NEW LEADER, 23 June I952, for extracts from Harvey C. Webster, "Nihilism As a Faith," copyright© 1952 by the Amer­ ican Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc. This page intentionally left blank Pre/ace One of the "composites" Sally and Robert Fitzgerald include in Mystery and Manners, their collection of Flannery O'Connor's "oc­ casional prose," is a piece with the unlikely sounding title "The Teaching of Literature." This composite includes Miss O'Connor's manuscript for a talk at a writers' conference (location unknown) and an article published in the Georgia Bulletin. It is one of the few essays in Mystery and Manners which we had not consulted in 1965 and 1966 when we first began close study of Miss O'Connor's fiction. Its appearance, after our work was done, has cheered us greatly, for every line of the following book is dedicated to the premise Miss O'Connor expresses in that essay: "the form of a story gives it mean­ ing which any other form would change." As teachers and writers, we came to our work with Miss O'Con­ nor's fiction convinced also of the truth of her claim that "unless the student is able, in some degree, to apprehend the form, he will never apprehend anything else about the work, except what is extrinsic to it as literature." It is almost as if Miss O'Connor, whose death in 1964 saddened us and hundreds of other readers, had personally com­ mended our method of treating her novels and stories. For though we are ourselves native Georgians and think we share with Miss O'Connor a part of our region's ambience, we have sought largely to exclude "what is extrinsic to [her work] as literature." We have been concerned with her stories as stories and as form, not as regional or sectarian formulations; we have not presumed to "understand" Miss O'Connor in any except literary terms, nor have we tried to rip out her themes as easy explanations of the mystery embodied in her stories. We have sought to interpret and evaluate the whole of Miss O'Connor's fictional achievement in what we regard as more inclusive terms than other critics have done. In 1966 at the University of Louisville Mrs. Brittain had completed her M.A. thesis, in which she xiv The Eternal Crossroads stressed the formal coherence and artistry of Miss O'Connor's works, not the regional grotesquerie so often observed by critics then. The emphasis of Mrs. Brittain's work, "Symbols of Violence: Flannery O'Connor's Structure of Reality," was almost entirely ontological, but it performed other vital scholarly chores as well: for example, her thesis indicated for the first time the extent to which Miss O'Connor revised short pieces for inclusion in her novels and in her collections. Furthermore, Mrs. Brittain's bibliography was the most thorough in existence when she submitted it to Bulletin of Bibliography, where it appeared in three parts. The Eternal Crossroads, an extension of Mrs. Brittain's thesis, rep­ resents our mutual admiration and respect for Miss O'Connor as an artist as well as our delight in her written words. Our pleasure in the stories has not diminished with our preparation of manuscript and the necessary attentiveness to the demands of scholarship. After several years of work, though continuing to avoid excessive reliance upon the facts of Miss O'Connor's life, we have attempted to place her works in perspective, to establish several major literary and theological influences, and to demonstrate the effect of those in­ fluences upon specific works. In particular, we have demonstrated that the French novelist Fran<_;ois Mauriac provided Miss O'Connor with ideas and images which-consciously or subconsciously-she made peculiarly her own. Initially she had tried, as she admitted, to "take over" the problems of Mauriac, and that effort delayed her find­ ing her own fictional voice. Our work traces her literary and doctrinal progression from what she regarded as excessive reliance on Mauriac, forward to her acceptance of the optimistic and idealistic Christology of another great French writer: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The change in Miss O'Connor's belief is not dramatic; nor do her stories change drastically: her published works are remarkably uni­ form in quality. Yet, as she enriched her faith through an increasingly positive sense of the redemption, her stories achieved greater luster. We regard her last stories as fulfillment of earlier promise. The organization of this book is simple: from establishment of Miss O'Connor's major literary influences we have proceeded to a chrono­ logical examination of all her published works, concentrating al­ ways on the essential unity and pervasive artistry of the whole. CHAPTER ONE The Eternal Crossroads IN oNE of her essays, 'The Regional Writer," Flannery O'Connor spoke of "the peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet." Though Miss O'Connor's task as a writer was to find the location of that "peculiar crossroads," her per­ sonal crossroads was Andalusia, her Georgia farmhouse near Mil­ ledgeville, where she lived with her widowed mother and indulged her fancy for raising poultry.