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A review by savaging
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor
3.0
I dislike so many things about Flannery O'Connor -- her dogmatic Catholicism, her venom toward the faithless world and other would-be writers -- and yet all the same I'm in love with her. I'm not the only one; what's wrong with us?
O'Connor's the mean girl in your writers' group:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility."
Her own explanations of her work is often irritating to me. Her ultimate aim is to preach Catholic dogma and further the glory of God. But what remarkable talent, that reading her fiction alone none of us would have guessed it.
At least half of the essays in this book are about being Catholic, and would have been helpful to me when I was studying literature at a religious university. In one class we watched an interview where Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, who also dabbles in painting, asserts that the role of the artist isn't to document the world with all its nastiness, but improve and perfect it. In contrast, O'Connor says the writer has to write what he or she sees, and "To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God." (Let's hope the two of them can have a curmudgeon-off one day in the starry Great Beyond.)
Or as O'Connor writes elsewhere: "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,' and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there -- showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything."
O'Connor's the mean girl in your writers' group:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility."
Her own explanations of her work is often irritating to me. Her ultimate aim is to preach Catholic dogma and further the glory of God. But what remarkable talent, that reading her fiction alone none of us would have guessed it.
At least half of the essays in this book are about being Catholic, and would have been helpful to me when I was studying literature at a religious university. In one class we watched an interview where Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, who also dabbles in painting, asserts that the role of the artist isn't to document the world with all its nastiness, but improve and perfect it. In contrast, O'Connor says the writer has to write what he or she sees, and "To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God." (Let's hope the two of them can have a curmudgeon-off one day in the starry Great Beyond.)
Or as O'Connor writes elsewhere: "I lent some stories to a country lady who lives down the road from me, and when she returned them, she said, 'Well, them stories just gone and shown you how some folks would do,' and I thought to myself that that was right; when you write stories, you have to be content to start exactly there -- showing how some specific folks will do, will do in spite of everything."