The New Yorker just published Paul Elie’s excellent piece on Flannery O’Connor’s racism. I won’t suggest that we stop reading a writer only because she once confessed, “I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain.” Or that her black characters are alternately lazy, stupid, and killers (see her final story, “Judgement Day,” for example). There are too many other reasons to stop reading Flannery O’Connor.
First, her characters do not have normal human relationships. There are no friendships between them, no falling in love, no warm familial interactions. They feel no sympathy for each other. A writer who fails to grapple with the nature of human connections is not a great writer.
Second, her characters are grotesques, freaks. She holds them at arm’s length and treats them with contempt. She once wrote, “it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” This aesthetic revolts me. I like reading about freaks as human beings, not as “figures for our essential displacement.”
Third, she makes facile uses of violence and revelation. Rather than emerging as the outcome of a human relationship, violence and revelation are easy ways for her to end a story or chapter with a hard-hitting punch. It’s brutalism.
Take these things all together: racism, lack of warmth, contempt, facile violence, unearned revelations, brutality masquerading as insight into the human condition. What do you get?
Leave literature out of it. What you get is fascism.
I won’t claim that Flannery O’Connor was a fascist or that reading her stories will turn you into one. But it’s time to stop calling her one of the great American writers and to recognize, instead, that she was one of the most pernicious. It’s time we stop teaching her stories to aspiring writers and to English students in high schools and colleges and teach them Zora Neale Hurston stories instead. I can’t think of two American storytellers more opposed to each other aesthetically, morally, and stylistically. They both take as their subject the poor people of the South, but their characters seem to be of different species.
Did O’Connor ever read Hurston, or Hurston ever read O’Connor? I doubt it. Both would have been horrified and disgusted.
O’Connor’s casual racism is not a flaw in the character of a great writer, but is entirely in keeping with her sensibility, aesthetics, and worldview. It should be the last nail in her reputation’s coffin.
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