Morality and Fiction

Last month the National Book Foundation honored Flannery O'Connor, yet again.

Each year since 1949 the Foundation has bestowed the National Book Award. Last month, in the fiction category, the Foundation chose the one best book from among the past 60 winners. Voters selected O'Connor's "Complete Stories."

As people who care about how stories are conceived and written, we'd naturally ask: What's so good about these stories? We might further wonder:

• Did O'Connor hold certain principles about how stories should be written? Is there something in her philosophy that readers and critics don't see so much anymore? And if so, is there something magnetic about it?
• Did she believe something about the purpose of stories that today's writers don't? And is there, in that purpose, something that nourishes us-something we can't get in today's fiction?
• Was there something different about the way she developed characters? And is there, as a result, some mesmerizing quality that draws us to them?

In the next three posts we'll take a brief look at each question.

Did O'Connor hold certain principles about how stories are to be written?

When O'Connor wrote an essay called The Fiction Writer & His Country she was reacting to an editorial in Life magazine. The Life piece talked about the country's prosperity; it cited poll after poll, all attesting to the goodwill that permeated U.S. culture. But it criticized the country's literature. The writer wondered why so few novels reflected America's goodness. And where, he rhetorically asked, were the novelists who could see and convey the country's cheerful mood?

O'Connor thought the piece was simpleminded.  

In her reply, she wondered whether or not writers, and especially those who were Christian, could help but to be suspicious. Was there, she speculated, some dubious connection between the country's mood and the magazine's shrill demands? At the very least, she thought, one had to wonder "if these screams for joy would be quite so piercing if joy were really more abundant in our prosperous society."

Christian writers, O'Connor said, because of their distinctive worldview, couldn't avoid moral judgments, even if they were vaguely implied. So, when writers were asked to take their cue from a survey they were being asked to "separate mystery from manners and judgment from vision." This, she said, would force writers to produce work that was spineless and, even worse, dull. It was, she thought, the path of the least resistance, because even in 1960 truth was relative, and the border between moral and immoral was often debated.

Any writer who understood mankind's Fall and Christ's redemption couldn't take that path; they couldn't possibly find substance in "truth" that was more erratic than the weather. That kind of approach, she insisted, could only result in work that was "soggy, formless, and sentimental...."

While it was true, O'Connor said, that storytellers were concerned with the reality of what's before them, if we-the human race-thought ultimate truth could be gleaned from a Gallup poll-then, she feared, we had become pathetically shallow.

In the greatest fiction, O'Connor said, "the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense." Moral judgment, she believed, was an inseparable part of seeing the world, of understanding it, and coming to conclusions about the state of man and society. This was especially true for those who viewed the world from a Christian perspective.

Critics complained to O'Connor that Christianity was an obstacle for fiction writers. It was, they thought, a limitation, a belief that narrowed their perspective. She argued that the opposite was true. Her faith, she claimed, freed her to observe. Christianity, she said, wasn't "a set of rules which fixes what [the writer] sees in the world. It affects [the novelist's] writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery."

Writers who understood the world through the Bible's arc of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, she said, would find distortions in the world around them. Because they understand what God had originally intended, those distortions will be, to use her word, "repugnant." The writer's job, she held, is to make the distortions appear as distortions to an audience which thinks they're normal. "You've got to shock them," she said. "To the hard of hearing, you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."

Today, at the apex of postmodern thought, O'Connor's a throwback to a forgotten era. She believed in absolute truth. She understood God's perfect, moral standard. She understood the cosmic consequences of mankind's Fall. Therefore, she saw the distance between what-is and what ought to be. She wrote fiction so that we could see that distance, too.

Which is why her work is never "soggy, formless, or sentimental;" and why we, especially in the midst of postmodern times, never tire of her stories. 

Richard Doster is the editor of byFaith magazine. He is also the author of two novels, Safe at Home and Crossing the Lines, both published by David C. Cook Publishers