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On Belief,Conflict, and Universality: Flannery O’Connor, Walter Benn Michaels, Slavoj Žižek Thomas F. Haddox This is an essay born of exasperation, of the futility that I feel in confronting the interpretive impasse to which Flannery O’Connor drives me and, it would seem, just about everyone else who values her work. We all know, thanks to O’Connor’s essays and correspondence, what her intentions as a writer were; we all know whether we are persuaded by her arguments; and we have probably decimated forests staking out our own often mutually exclusive positions. The distinguished company of readers who share O’Connor’s theological premises, viewing her as a prophet who lashes our fallen world with the painful truth that Jesus died to save us, is matched by the distinguished company of readers, going at least as far back as John Hawkes, who hold that O’Connor is unknowingly of the Devil’s party. And these two contending sides are joined today by historicist-minded critics from Jon Lance Bacon to Patricia Yaeger, who see neither salvation nor nihilism in her work but only the distorted reflections of the racist, sexist, class-obsessed, and Cold War–damaged culture that was the South of her lifetime. The situation has not changed much since 1992, when Frederick Crews complained that “there is never a shortage of volunteers to replace the original antagonists” (156) in the fundamental debates over O’Connor’s work. Some of us ask, “Should we take O’Connor’s Catholicism seriously or stow it away in a box marked ‘false consciousness ’ or ‘irrelevant window dressing’”? Others among us ask, “Should we condemn O’Connor for remaining silent before the racial injustices of her time, or praise her for registering some slight or partial resistance to them?” These questions will outlive us, because they cannot be definitively answered as long as we continue to act as though O’Connor’s literary corpus provides all that we need to answer them. Although we pride ourselves on having escaped the limitations of the New Criticism, and although we repeat the notion that there is no disinterested point of view so often that it has become a bromide, the protocols of academic discourse still require us to act as if our arguments Thomas F. Haddox 232 were latent in texts themselves and only incidentally positions in which we happen to believe. When we approach O’Connor, however, such protocols get us nowhere, for at this late date, it should be clear that all of these contending positions are amply supported by textual evidence. There is no good reason to doubt the sincerity or the orthodoxy of O’Connor’s beliefs, and once we know how these beliefs informed her fictional practice, we must acknowledge her consistency in applying them: there is no necessary contradiction, for instance, in the claim that the Grandmother’s murder in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” or Mrs. May’s goring on the horn of the scrub bull in “Greenleaf,” might simultaneously function as the salvation of these women.1 Those who blanch at the ferocity of O’Connor’s vision, and dispute that so violent and uncompromising a stance can be authentically Christian, need to read more both about the dogmas and the history of Christianity. On the other hand, it is equally evident that if O’Connor was writing, as she maintained in a letter to Betty Hester, for “the people who think God is dead” (HB 92) and was seeking to shock them into a life-changing awareness of the Incarnation, then she failed at least as often as she succeeded. Early readers such as Josephine Hendin and Martha Stephens, who found O’Connor’s fundamental premises (though not necessarily her fiction) repellent, were neither stupid nor ignorant of O’Connor’s intentions, and while such readers might be guilty of the intellectual hubris that O’Connor loved to skewer in her fiction, one cannot charge them with willful misreading of the text. Their own beliefs may be wrong, but their arguments are based on an examination of O’Connor’s fiction in good faith through the light of these beliefs. Moreover, anyone who has taught O’Connor repeatedly knows that uninitiated students typically adore her work and are deft at generating interpretations, but they almost never arrive at those that O’Connor intended. My avowedly secular students, upon hearing of O’Connor’s religious orthodoxy, are puzzled and...

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