Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
James T. KeaneJanuary 14, 2008
As I’ve been preparing for a new semester of teaching at Fordham (a course on Catholic novels), I’ve been rereading Flannery O’Connor’s brilliant essay collection, Mystery and Manners. One of the essays included in that volume (edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) was originally published in America in 1957 as "The Church And The Fiction Writer."
O’Connor is of course a wonderful writer, uncompromising in her acid judgments of what she perceives to be false piety or sentimentalism and also a staunch defender of the Catholic aesthetic in literature. At times, these twin convictions can make her seem an elitist, a writer without much appreciation for her reader, but much of what she said in 1957 is also true in 2008. Witness her following comment from "The Church And The Fiction Writer":
If the average Catholic reader could be tracked down through the swamps of letters-to-the-editor and other places where he momentarily reveals himself, he would be found to be something of a Manichean. By separating nature and grace as much as possible, he has reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliche and has become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms, the sentimental and the obscene. He would seem to prefer the former, while being more of an authority on the latter, but the similarity between the two generally escapes him. He forgets that sentimentality is an excess, a distortion of sentiment, usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence; and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite.

What I admire most about O’Connor’s essays is her unwillingness to become defensive, to be solely an apologist for the One True Faith in the face of modernist, secularist, and atheistic trends in the culture for which she writes. Rather, she expects from her readers an ability to push beyond reactionary judgments and emotional response, to seek always the truth of reality, and then to be pleasantly surprised at the way that real world corresponds to a proper Christian understanding of the world and the human condition.


Jim Keane, SJ
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

The conclave that begins next Wednesday to elect a successor for Pope Francis is the first in 46 ½ years for which the Vatican hasn’t ordered a set of cassocks from the two best-known papal tailors.
Papabile: How do conclave watchers come up with their lists of the next pope—and should we trust them?
Inside the VaticanMay 01, 2025
The people of God see the bishop of Rome as a teacher, but they also unquestionably see him as a father.
J.D. Long GarcíaMay 01, 2025
Since the death of Pope Francis, lists of his possible successors have proliferated on social media and in newspapers. Should you trust them?
Colleen DulleMay 01, 2025