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How the Symbol Means: Deferral vs. Confrontation in The Sound and the Fury and "The Artificial Nigger"
- The University of Tennessee Press
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How the Symbol Means: Deferral vs. Confrontation in The Sound and the Fury and “The Artificial Nigger” John D. Sykes Jr. Flannery O’Connor was in a peculiar position in regard to literary modernism, as I have argued elsewhere. On the one hand, she was an heir and proponent of prose techniques developed by writers such as Gustave Flaubert, Henry James (especially as commented upon by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction), and James Joyce. The presuppositions of this poetics were impressed upon her from the time of her first serious writing instruction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, some of it under the tutelage of New Critical theorists, as Sarah Fodor has detailed. Once O’Connor left graduate school and began sending her work to Caroline Gordon, the established writer gave her constant advice along modernist lines, and was in matters of style her modernist conscience. Sally Fitzgerald does not exaggerate when she calls these exchanges O’Connor’s “master class.” Both O’Connor’s correspondence and her essays show her dedication to such ideals as “show, don’t tell” and her close attention to point of view. But because of her sense of Christian vocation, she sometimes chafed under modernist rules. In one letter, having briefly explained Gordon’s devotion to Jamesian technique to her friend Betty Hester, O’Connor confessed her frustration with its rigors: “Point of view runs me nuts,” she declared (HB 157). Modernism is strongly antididactic. O’Connor had a message. Her problem might be stated in this form: How do I convey Christian truth without stating it? An important part of her solution to this problem had to do with her use of symbol, and the degree to which her use of symbol is a departure from modernism becomes apparent when one compares her work to Faulkner’s. A caveat is in order here. When I say O’Connor sought to convey Christian truth as a part of her vocation as a Catholic writer, I do not mean to suggest she was a preacher looking for sermon illustrations. She does not set out to write example stories—Aesop’s fables for the faithful—and she certainly has John D. Sykes Jr. 126 no truck with promoting sentimental piety. No Little Evas or Uncle Toms here. Indeed, even the phrase “conveying Christian truth” is misleading insofar as it suggests O’Connor has a list of doctrines she must somehow inject into her readers’ minds. But as her eloquent statements in the essays collected in Mystery and Manners make clear, she believed that Christian doctrine accurately disclosed the nature of God and God’s dealings with creation, and she thought that belief inevitably shaped how she saw the world and what she found in it. More specifically, what she expected to see when she looked honestly at the world through her fiction was God’s activity, no matter how disguised and even repugnant it might be. She wrote Betty Hester that “the moral basis of Poetry is the accurate naming of the things of God” (CW 980). Rather than Christian dogma’s imposing blinders, O’Connor believed that “dogma is an instrument for penetrating reality” (MM 178). And here we come to a crucial point about symbol. It is an epistemological point. For O’Connor, an effective symbol has a transcendent referent—that is, it refers to something beyond the horizon of human language and consciousness. O’Connor’s understanding of symbol is rooted in her reading of St. Thomas, with whose Summa she spent twenty minutes every evening (CW 945). Like Thomas, O’Connor believed that human language can and does refer to God, though it does so through analogy and not directly. A literary symbol may likewise disclose the truth about God, although it always does so in an incomplete and limited way. John Desmond’s succinct declaration is apt: “The doctrine of the analogy of being . . . provided the metaphysical basis for O’Connor’s practice as a fiction writer” (31). The view of symbol held by most modernists runs counter to this Scholastic understanding of analogy. For writers such as Joyce and Faulkner, the symbol is an invention of the artist that brings into human consciousness a world—or at least a scheme for comprehending the world—which did not previously exist. This view is presaged in Shelley’s declaration that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Without the creative act of the poet no human...