Flannery O'Connor by Preston M. Browning, Jr. (review)

226Reviews speak seriously of Miller's "aesthetics" and his "art" in the seventies. Mitchell does not attempt, as he warns us, to make MiUer into a systematic thinker, but he is concerned to isolate Miller's view of the nature and function of art as these views establish Miller in a particular tradition of "artist-seer." The direction of this inquiry is certainly one that should be continued. The selection from Gordon, which concludes the collection, points at last to an interest in Miller's form, a problem too seldom confronted. Renewed critical interest in such questions as the nature of literary "character" and the nature ofnarrative shouldhave more to say about these problems in the future. But the readers of Three Decades should, of course, turn to Gordon's book itself for an evaluation of how successful he has been in his attempt to assess Miller's achievement. The same should be said for Kingsley Widmer's earlier book, representedhereby a selection. In this respect, Three Decades is valuable less for the Miller "specialist" than for the serious "student" of American literature for whom the questions concerning Henry Miller are unfamiliar, in part because of their infrequent discussion in the major journals. For such individuals, the chronology at the beginning of the book, Mitchell's introductions to the selections from each decade, and the selected checklist at the end are helpful. But if the checklist had been annotated, its value would have been far greater. Collections of important essays on individual writers are always convenient; none of these essays will leave the reader entirely satisfied, but he will find himself well aware of the appropriate questions. Northeastern UniversityJane Nelson Browning, Preston M., Jr. Fhnnery O'Connor. Preface by Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1974. 143 pp. Cloth: $6.95. The gospel according to Flannery O'Connor has remained sacred territory formost of her critics. The majority have unquestioningly accepted her assertions that "my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil" and that "it is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind." They have examined her novels and stories with a side glance at her statements about craft, honoring her intentions and religious commitments. For these critics, she has handsomely maintained an asymmetrical position through her brief 39 years: a Catholic writer in a Protestant South, crippled early by lupus, who briUiantly triumphed over her handicaps by creating the most theologically haunted fiction since the Faulkner of Light in August. There have been occasional attempts at puncturing the myth. John Hawkes, in a much-discussed essay, "Flannery O'Connor's Devil," Sewanee Review (1962), asserts somewhat irreverently: "Certainly Flannery O'Connor reveals what can only be called brilliant creative perversity. . . . This much, I should think, is happily on the side of the devil." Josephine Hendin, in The World of Fhnnery O'Connor (1970), takes to task those O'Connor critics who have narrowly subscribed to the "religious interpretation" and proceeds virtually to turn the fiction inside out and to refashion the O'Connor universe. Hers is a warts-and-all approach which accepts none of the established critical pieties. Martha Stephens' The Question of Fhnnery O'Connor (1973), probably the best book we have about the Georgia writer, worries a good deal about "inadequate tonal resolutions" and the dimensions of a religious consciousness which "was as grim and literalistic, as joyless and loveless a faith ... as we have ever seen in American letters." Studies in American Fiction227 Preston Browning sympathetically considers the position of these nay-sayers (aïï but that of Martha Stephens, whose book seems to have appeared too late for him to acknowledge) and opts for the more widely accepted "mystery and manners'' approach. He sets forth his position clearly in his opening chapter: Briefly, my conclusions are that Flannery O'Connor's work may be conceived as an effort to recover the idea of the Holy in an age inwhich both the meaning andthereality of this concepthavebeen obscured; that she perceived that loss of the Holy involved for contemporary man a concomitant loss of...