I had a conversation with a colleague today about readers identifying with writers, gaining a sense that you somehow know the writer and understand her in a profound way. I remember as a teenager being enamored of Anne Sexton, reading her biography and all of her poetry and feeling like she was really saying something to me, helping me understand myself, like I understood her and she me. As an undergrad I did a major research project on Sexton and got frighteningly consumed in that world—and got pretty depressed in the process. As an adult I understand Sexton much differently and my fantasy version of her is a little more grounded and little less dangerous.
But I have not entirely outgrown the tendency to get swept up in the fantasy of an author. I have such a relationship with Flannery O’Connor. I first read O’Connor’s “Good Country People” as an undergrad and immediately loved it because of the Southern grotesqueness of it. It was like she took the things that I had seen growing up in the rural South and turned them up a notch in a shocking and darkly hilarious way. A couple of years later I started to really study her work for my master’s thesis. I read her biography and her letters along with all her stories in chronological order.
Through that process I constructed an image of O’Connor as a writer, a woman, a Southerner, and a Christian on a very specific mission to communicate the highest truth to the world. She wanted to make everyone in the non-believing world understand that the Devil is real and that we are all wretched and that the path to Grace can be painful. The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away. That mission was so important to her that she constantly wrote letters and gave speeches about how everyone was going to miss the point because in the modern world no one reads the Bible and no one believes in the Devil or anything else for that matter. And so in her final collection of stories, knowing that she was dying, she drove the point home over and over, finally showing in “Revelation” the masses marching up to heaven, all the classes and races mixed together.
I can’t say that I’m on board with O’Connor’s theology, but when I’m reading her work and what she wrote about her work I believe her and I want to let her show me her truth. And I’m so certain that I understand what that truth is.
So I think that I can’t write about her anymore. I don’t think that I can be an O’Connor scholar by profession. The fantasy is too big. I’m teaching a class this summer on O’Connor, and I think that I can do that well. I hope I can communicate my enthusiasm in a way that will promote enthusiasm in my students, and I think that I can present the material and relevant criticism and biographical facts in a way that promotes multiple interpretations and interesting discussion.
But I don’t think I can write about her anymore. Maybe on Wikipedia.
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2 comments:
I know that this has nothing to do with the point of your post, but your mentioning O'Connor that way made me wonder if you had ever read the collection of essays (did she put together?) called _The Christ-Haunted Landscape_ about how Southern fiction cannot escape its religious entrapments.
Back to your post, though, I know that there are some things I cannot write on, because I love the world I made too much. I'm like that about Russian nationalist music (19th c). As a child and young teenager I had created a world somewhere between the Nutcracker and Sheherazade, and I'm not willing to give that up to scholarship. :-)
Jeanette--I have read that collection--thanks! O'Connor used the term "Christ-haunted" to describe the South, and it has been used since then by countless critics. Amazingly accurate term.
Thanks for sharing, too. I kind of hoped that posting that would bring others to share similar feelings. It's not often in the academic world that we talk about what we love for the love of it.
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