Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South

Eight. The Word and the Image: Self-Taught Art, the Bible, the Spirit, and Southern Creativity

8 The Word and the Image Self-Taught Art, the Bible, the Spirit, and Southern Creativity Flannery O’Connor, the Georgia-born, Roman Catholic writer whose most acclaimed works appeared in the 1950s, saw the South through a lens of faith that would have enabled her to appreciate the region’s self-taught artists. She was a storyteller and so too have been these creative visionaries. The storyteller, for O’Connor, “is concerned with what is,” and for a storyteller of faith, “what [she] sees on the surface will be of interest to [her] only as [she] can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.” The mystery she speaks of is “the mystery of [humankind’s] position on earth,” and she used an accompanying word, “manners,” to describe the work of the creative person dealing with matters of faith: “The manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.” She saw the fiction writer as “concerned with ultimate mystery as [found] embodied in the concrete world of sense experience.” Sense perceptions are indeed the raw stuff of creative people everywhere, but O’Connor saw clearly that the senses should tie the creative imagination to place, to region. “The things we see, hear, smell, and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all, and the South impresses its image on us from the moment we are able to distinguish one’s own from another,” she wrote. The Word and the Image 147 The southern writer discovers “being bound through the senses to a particular society and a particular history, to particular sounds and a particular idiom,” and that discovery is the beginning of a realization that puts that writer’s work “into real human perspective.”1 O’Connor’s observations about the southern writer are revealing about the creative context for the imagination and its use of religion in the American South. The region’s writers, musicians, and folk artists operate within a cultural context in which a particular form of faith, evangelical Protestantism, has dominated for so long that it offers creative people an idiom of its own, with images, stories, symbols, rituals, institutions, and experiences they can explore. O’Connor notes further that “the writer whose themes are religious needs a region where these themes find a response in the life of the people” (200), and the creative imagination is surely spurred by a place known as the Bible Belt because of its fervent religiosity. Without question, the American South has become a place of significance on the world’s spiritual map. V. S. Naipaul visited the region in the 1980s and concluded he had never been anywhere where people took right behavior and religious faith so seriously. In recounting the importance of the senses to the budding writer, O’Connor mentioned first the “things we see,” and the visual sense has indeed been a key one in southern creativity. Much more familiar , though, is the oral orientation of the South, its inclination toward experiences that are perceived through the aural sense. The word has been central to the South’s culture, whether folk philosophers telling stories on porches and at country stores, preachers and lawyers using language to win souls and make their legal cases, professional humorists making listeners chuckle, or writers and singers, who have epitomized the region’s styles for so long, crafting language to enthrall readers and fans. “When one Southern character speaks,” O’Connor notes, “regardless of his station in life, an echo of all Southern life is heard” (199). But the South has also presented its observers with a compelling visual landscape , and creative people have responded to it. The land itself offers an often lush image, with flora and fauna that seem exotic to outsiders and that can stimulate a gothic imagination among writers and artists. The Bible has been an essential source for the visual culture of the South, with an amalgamation of written words, oral delivery, and visual representations making southerners familiar with the images coming out 148 Chapter Eight of the scriptures. Even in a society with relatively high rates of illiteracy for the United States, southerners knew Bible characters and stories. “It takes a story to make a story,” O’Connor noted, a story of “mythic dimensions, one which belongs to everybody, one in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and...