Gratuitous Flannery O'Connor Post
Have been reading slowly through Mystery and Manner, a small posthumous collection of Flannery O'Connor's essays. I am moved to share some tidbits.
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks...said he hoped that our next literary phase would restore that central literature which combines the great subject matter of the middlebrow writers with the technical expertness bequeathed by the new critics and which would thereby restore literature as a mirror and guide for society.
For the kind of writer I have been describing, a literature that mirrors society would be no fit guide for it, and one which did manage, by sheer art, to do both these things would have to have recourse to more violent means than middlebrow subject matter and mere technical expertness. -- From "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature"
I'm pretty sure that I have no idea what she's talking about, here. I'm also pretty sure that it's awesome. Some more, slightly less opaque, tidbits:
The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you. -- From "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"
The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable. -- Also from "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature"
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catecumens, wrote: "The dragon sits by the side of the road watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller. -- From "The Fiction Writer and His Country"
Good stuff, yo. I highly recommend "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in particular to any and all writers of genre fiction, since it has a lot to say that applies as well or better to genre storytelling as it does to the Southern Gothic style that O'Connor was addressing.
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks...said he hoped that our next literary phase would restore that central literature which combines the great subject matter of the middlebrow writers with the technical expertness bequeathed by the new critics and which would thereby restore literature as a mirror and guide for society.
For the kind of writer I have been describing, a literature that mirrors society would be no fit guide for it, and one which did manage, by sheer art, to do both these things would have to have recourse to more violent means than middlebrow subject matter and mere technical expertness. -- From "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature"
I'm pretty sure that I have no idea what she's talking about, here. I'm also pretty sure that it's awesome. Some more, slightly less opaque, tidbits:
The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn't try to write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you. -- From "The Nature and Aim of Fiction"
The writer has no rights at all except those he forges for himself inside his own work. We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties, or on the notion that fiction must represent the typical, that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable. -- Also from "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature"
St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catecumens, wrote: "The dragon sits by the side of the road watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon." No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller. -- From "The Fiction Writer and His Country"
Good stuff, yo. I highly recommend "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" in particular to any and all writers of genre fiction, since it has a lot to say that applies as well or better to genre storytelling as it does to the Southern Gothic style that O'Connor was addressing.