Inference, Image and Inspiration: Three about Flannery O’Connor

Inference,ImageandInspiration: Three aboutFlannery O'Connor RobertColes.Flanne,y O'Connor's South. BatonRouge: Louisiana State University Press,1980.166+ xxxpp. BarbaraMcKenzie. Flannery O'Connor's Georgia. Forewordby Robert Coles. Athens: The University ofGeorgiaPress, 1980.78 + xxxpp. CarolShloss.Flannery O'Connor's Dark Comedies: TheLimits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 1980.159pp. Diane McGifford The only thing these three recent publications have in common- apart from a propensity to quote some of O'Connor's nastier witticisms-is Flannery O'Connor's name in their titles. Each book reflects a radically different sensibility and engages a different facet of O'Connor's art or personality, so that the reader of all three is rewarded with a "mini" interdisciplinary view ofthiscontroversial woman from Georgia. Carol Shloss'sFlanne1yO'Connor s Dark Comedies is a scholarly, sophisticated work of literary criticism which exploresthe anagogical dimensions of O'Connor's art; photographer Barbara McKenzie in Flannery O'Connor sGeorgia attempts to translate the comic and violent aspects of O'Connor's fiction into visual images; Robert Coles's Flannery O'Connor's South assumes the voice of Southern apologist, addressing us mere mortals on the complexities of the social and cultural fabric in O'Connor's South. Though these books are qualitatively uneven and each mirrors the limits of its discipline and author, read as a group they persuade the reader that the interdisciplinary approach to literature is not onlygreater than the sum of its parts, but also the most fruitful in elucidating the central mystery in O'Connor's fiction: her myth-haunted perceptions of reality filtered through the concrete peculiarities of her locale. Carol Shloss claims that O'Connor fails as a writer of anagogical fiction. Shloss's claim is a daring one because it casts aspersions on a writer whose tragic death from lupus seems to have ignited sympathetic fervor and made Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 13, Number 3, Winter 1982 390 Diane McGifford O'Connor a "darling" of the critics, not a role this unsentimental and sardonic woman would have wished for herself. Yet, Shloss's conclusions are not cavalieror merely contentious, but grow naturally from her carefully reasoned and perceptive analysis of O'Connor's fiction. Most importantly, let it be said, Shloss'sstudy isrefreshing in that it breaks with traditional O'Connor criticism by refusing to interpret the fiction with a Catholic catechism in one hand and the writings of influential Catholics in the other. Put simply, Shloss returns us to the texts. Itisappropriate that Shloss has subtitled her book The Limits of Inference, for, according to the thesis presented here, O'Connor's failure as a writer of anagogical fiction is attributable to "the limits of inference." Beginning with O'Connor's publicly avowed position that she addressed the spiritually ignorant for whom God was dead, Shloss argues that O'Connor's art must be evaluated with reference to the spiritually ignorant and those "untutored in religious belief" (p. 4). Shloss continues, "If one of the aims of writing is to communicate the spiritual ... writers must ... notonly allow the text to be read on an anagogical level, but make such a reading inevitable'' (pp. 7-8). In our modern society where theology is relative and unfixed, Shloss argues that the writer of "religious sensibility is inevitably forced into the role of rhetorician " (p. 7). Shlossbelieves that the spiritual meaning in O'Connor had to be inferred from the rhetoric, but that O'Connor's failure to grasp the limits of inference and her rhetorical ineptitude created a fiction where the anagogical level is missing, obscure or inconclusive. In the first two chapters Shloss treats the questions of textual implication and the writer's sense of audience. That she has done her critical homework is apparent in her awareness of and sympathy toward the Christian artist's plight in an atheological culture; but, as well, she anticipates the untutored reader's plight and unequivocally states that anagogical fiction is esthetically sound only when the text presents a basis for the reader's judgment. This is doubly true with O'Connor's fiction because the artist herself believed that the spiritually blighted modern reader was...