Religion, Idolatry, and Catholic Irony: Flannery O'Connor's Modest Literary Vision

Introduction: On Adolescence and Authority, Region, and Religion

WRITING TO HIS LIFELONG FRIEND Walker Percy in 1969, the Mississippi novelist and historian Shelby Foote assessed the life and career of their contemporary and fellow Southerner Flannery O'Connor:

She had the real clew, the solid gen, on what it's about; I just wish she'd had time to demonstrate it fully instead of in fragments. She's a minor-minor writer, not because she lacked the talent to be a major one, but simply because she died before her development had time to evolve out of the friction of just living enough years to soak up the basic joys and sorrows. That, and I think because she also didn't have time to turn her back on Christ, which is something every great Catholic writer (that I know of, I mean) has done. Joyce, Proust--and, I think, Dostoevsky, who was just about the least Christian man I ever encountered except maybe Hemingway. . . . I always had the feeling that O'Connor was going to be one of our big talents; I didn't know she was dying--which of course means I misunderstood her. She was a slow developer, like most good writers, and just plain didn't have the time she needed to get around to the ordinary world, which would have been her true subject after she emerged from the "grotesque" one she explored throughout the little time she had.¹

Foote's image of O'Connor is striking not only for what it expresses about her life and writings, but perhaps even more so for its imaginative portrait of the person who might have evolved into a very different writer with age and maturity. Foote reads O'Connor not simply on the basis of her work--two novels, two collections of short stories, and a handful of nonfiction essays--but considers her work in the larger context of her life and early death (at thirty-nine, from complications of lupus). O'Connor's portrait here takes on a very particular qualification, that of genius whose full realization and expression did not receive time enough for fulfillment. Foote's description of the life O'Connor did experience, characterized by "the friction of just living enough years to soak up the basic joys and sorrows," implies the opportunity, if one survives long enough, to emerge into a more fully mature and complete sense of personal and authorial identity. It is an identity, Foote seems to suggest, that enables a writer to confront more sweeping subjects, to address a more universal, cosmic range of human experience, and, eventually, to have some claim to being a major literary figure.

Along with Percy, Foote himself provides an excellent lens through which to view O'Connor's standing in American literature and especially in the Southern literature of their time. Both Percy and Foote might be classified as minor writers whose fiction struggles to attain major status without ever quite doing so. In relation to canonical issues, Foote is perhaps the more interesting of the two because of his decision to abandon fiction in order to complete his epic, three-volume nonfiction work, The Civil War: A Narrative. The work took twenty years to write and essentially prevented him from continuing his own career development from young novelist to, perhaps, the kind of major figure he envisions in the O'Connor who might have been. That the subject of his greatest work is the American Civil War serves as a most appropriate central presence in Foote's career, and in many ways in the overall body of great twentieth-century Southern writing. The Civil War, whose final volume was published in 1974, serves as a monumental testament to that event whose influence on the maturation of the United States as...