SOURCE: Klug, M. A. “Flannery O'Connor and the Manichean Spirit of Modernism.” Southern Humanities Review 17, no. 4 (fall 1983): 303-14.

[In the following essay, Klug maintains that O'Connor's negative attitude towards modernism and the modern writer “sets her at odds with the whole tradition of American fiction in this century and with the type of spiritual hero which that tradition has produced.”]

Flannery O'Connor made no secret of her contempt for the modern age. Her antagonism to it goes far beyond the artist's conventional scorn of science, technology, middle-class values, “the smell of steaks in passage-ways.” She attacks the central assumptions of literary modernism as vigorously as those of our social and economic life and for the same reason. As O'Connor sees it, the modern consciousness in all its manifestations is corrupted by the Manichean predisposition “to separate spirit and matter.”¹ As her letters and occasional prose clearly indicate, she blames this compulsion to separate spiritual truth from concrete reality for the two opposing kinds of excess that disfigure modern fiction. On the one hand, it leads to a terminal romanticism which disregards the material world in pursuit of abstraction. On the other hand, it encourages a terminal realism or naturalism which ignores the possibility of any spiritual meaning and sinks in an accumulation of concrete detail.

One measure of O'Connor's distrust of the modern consciousness is her constant fear of being misunderstood by her audience. She sees even the typical Catholic reader to be “more of a Manichean than the Church permits.”² As a result, Catholic readers come to fiction with the same false expectations as secular readers do. At one extreme, modern readers look for uplift. Having no respect for the fabric of material life that sustains fiction, they search out some kind of pure meaning that can be refined from it and in the process turn it into a “problem to be solved, something which you evaporate to get Instant Enlightenment.”³ At the other extreme, they are blind or indifferent to any deeper meaning that fiction might express and insist that it give them a “realism of fact,” which is faithful “to the way things look and happen in normal life.”⁴ Surrounded by an audience infected with the modern virus of separating spiritual and material reality, O'Connor writes for that unified mind “willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.”⁵

But if O'Connor is often irritated with the modern reader, she has a more substantial conflict with her fellow writers. This is potentially a two-front war, but O'Connor declares “strict” naturalism a “dead end in fiction”⁶ and concentrates her assault on the perverse romanticism of the modern novel. She begins by condemning the romantic idealization of the modern writer as a sensitive loner. The myth of the lonely writer is “pernicious and untruthful.”⁷ It makes a virtue of alienation, converting what “was once a diagnosis” into an ideal that dominates “much of the fiction of our time.”⁸ For O'Connor, the artist's assumption of superiority to ordinary people and his or her willful cultivation of alienation are symptoms of the Manichean urge to escape from material creation in order to take up residence in the purely spiritual realm of one's own mind.⁹ Once secure from the intrusion of finite things, romantic artists can undertake the true work of forging their own souls, creating their own immortality through their vision or their work. In opposing this notion that artists achieve or fabricate their own essential selves, O'Connor takes her stand against one of the basic postulates of the modern American writer. It sets her at odds with the whole tradition of American fiction in this century and with the type of spiritual hero which that tradition has produced.

The typical spiritual heroes in our fiction begin by rejecting the soul as an eternal self that is given to all. The soul must be achieved or discovered in some faculty of the personality—usually the imagination, the intellect, or the will—that sets the hero apart from common folk. A familiar version of this modern quest for the essential self might be called the aesthetic heresy. The soul is equated with aspiration, with the urge to self-perfection that realizes itself in immortal creation or some other transcendent experience. The prototype of the spiritual hero becomes a kind of artist whatever the hero's occupation might be. The hero is a romantic artist of the self, furiously laboring to give birth to his or her own perfected being through the achievement of a personal destiny. We find this author of one's own self emerging in those heroes of the will and “self made” persons who show up in the novels of the early naturalists. In Dreiser's Carrie Meeber and Eugene Witla and in Cather's Thea Kronborg, we see the full birth of the type as it has passed into contemporary fiction and appears, often crippled with irony, in the works of such writers as Bellow, Ellison, Plath, Barth, and Pynchon.

In refusing the inherent soul in favor of one that must be achieved, the spiritual hero of modern fiction faces mortal consequences that are familiar to every reader, since they supply many of the motifs of the literature of alienation. They are also precisely those consequences that O'Connor laments as the effect of the Manichean compulsion to try to “approach the infinite … without any mediation of matter”¹⁰ and which in turn she examines in the central characters of her own novels. The typical spiritual heroes of our fiction usually forsake their homes early in their careers. They have to be free to begin making themselves, but on a deeper level their rejection of home is an unconscious denial of that familiar world in which all persons are endowed with a soul and share a common spiritual inheritance and kinship. This act of denial leads to an irreconcilable conflict between such heroes and their environments. Ordinary people are reduced to an inert mass, threatening to absorb the unique being of the hero. Carrie Meeber's terror of the ordinary fate, embodied in the rank of anonymous shopgirls, has infected almost every subsequent hero of American fiction who has set out to find his or her destiny. In the most extreme cases, the hero is caught in a landscape of death and beset by vampires who thirst after the hero's being. Beneath this estrangement is the total failure of spiritual understanding. Heroes of modern fiction cannot locate their reflections in the eyes of ordinary humanity that surround them. The symptoms of the hero's loss of spiritual vision show up all across our fiction—in the frozen objectivity of the early realists and naturalists, in the paranoid fear of being watched which haunts so many of the central characters of recent fiction, and again in the constant preoccupation with voyeurism and the theme of blindness which shows up in the work of such writers as Bellow, Hawkes, Ellison, Plath, Malamud, Percy, and James Dickey. It is small wonder that modern heroes, surrounded by a hostile environment that threatens their very souls, characteristically retreat or try to retreat into a safe place in the hopes of preserving their spiritual beings.

Most readers are struck by the “primitive” eccentricity of the central characters of O'Connor's two novels. But for all their backwoods peculiarity, Hazel Motes and young Tarwater are full of “the poison of the modern world.”¹¹ They are possessed by the same Manichean predisposition as the recurrent spiritual hero of our fiction. Both of them begin as parodies of the modern hero, undertaking the same quest and confronting the same irreconcilable conflict as that line of self seekers following after Carrie Meeber. Each denies the inherent soul which binds him to God and creation in order to fashion his own being and his own salvation. As a result, each suffers that loss of home, or “essential displacement,” that O'Connor, along with most other recent novelists, sees as the fundamental condition of the modern hero. Having denied God's presence within, they cannot bear to see him in the material world or in the eyes of their fellow men, and they wander blindly among dead things and dead neighbors. To escape the weight of the finite, each withdraws in the hope of locating a sanctuary where he can achieve his own spiritual salvation.

Hazel Motes wants desperately to be an infidel, but he can never really lose his belief. He has to betray it. He turns his face from the “wild ragged figure” of Christ,¹² so that he can be free to become himself. To declare his independence, he must first deny his own given soul, “get rid of it once and for all” (p. 17). Finally he must free himself from the inherited burden of sin if he is ever to be totally his own. He continually has to insist that he is clean, but that he “wouldn't be if Christ existed” (p. 53). Haze knows that if he admits sin he will never be free of the need for redemption, will forever be bound to Christ along with the rest of fallen mankind.

The price of being clean is isolation.¹³ When Haze first rejects Christ, he believes that he can return to the familiar world of Eastrod, Tennessee. He assures himself that his misery is just a longing for home. But his denial seals his displacement. He finds Eastrod deserted and heads for the nearest city, since he “might as well go one place as another” (p. 11). In Taulkinham, Haze is almost totally alone. He would like to immerse himself in the world of the flesh to prove his disregard for the spirit, but it repels him. His sexual transgressions are acts of ritual defiance that he performs in spite of his physical disgust with the body. When anyone reaches towards Haze, his instinctive reaction is “keep your hands off me.” Mrs. Watts, Sabbath Hawkes, and Mrs. Flood all promise him a “place where he can be” in this world, but Haze spurns their offers. He insists that without Christ there can be no home for us except within ourselves. Each man is free or doomed to inhabit his own being: “In yourself right now is all the place you've got” (p. 90).

Throughout the novel Haze tries to make his home within his own self, safe from Christ and from a world in which he has lost his place. He continually retreats into dark, narrow spaces where he can be alone.¹⁴ Early in the novel he runs to his pullman berth to escape the “heavy and pink” flesh of Mrs. Wally B. Hitchcock. He draws the curtains and settles into his place, which resembles a partially closed coffin. In the darkness, Haze recalls how his closest kin one by one had lain powerless as the lids closed upon their death boxes. As the scene draws to an end, he imagines or dreams that the lid is closing upon his own coffin and calls out Christ's name in something between a curse and an appeal. This brief scene is part of a symbolic pattern which reveals Haze's psychological and spiritual conflict. In a Manichean flight, he runs from the world of the flesh into his own consciousness. Once he has secured himself, he is haunted by guilt of his own betrayal of his faith and by the death of kinship which follows. In this most vulnerable moment, he senses that his isolation is not the way to salvation but a living death. The clearest example of this pattern shows up in Haze's attempts to withdraw into the safe confines of his “rat-coloured” car, which O'Connor describes as “his pulpit and his coffin as well as something he thinks of as a means of escape. … The car is a kind of death-in-life symbol.”¹⁵ Haze buys the car “mostly to be a house” or a “place to be” (p. 43). It is his justification, the outward sign that he has won his own salvation. Only in the unguarded moment, when he cannot attempt to justify his own being, does he come close to the truth. After he locks the car and draws its curtains against the worldly corruption of Hoover Shoats, he again slides into a nightmare vision of his own isolation. He dreams that he is buried alive in his Essex, separated by a layer of glass from the eyes that peer in “through the back oval window at his situation” (p. 88). The onlookers are as powerless to touch Haze as he is to raise himself up. When he awakens, he shakes off the nightmare and its message.

Much of Haze's life goes into avoiding messages. He must put out his spiritual eyes in order to sustain his denial of God.¹⁶ In this act of self-mutilation, he forfeits his inherent capacity to see creation, to penetrate the concrete world and “find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.”¹⁷ His spiritual blindness is exactly that which O'Connor ascribes to Manicheans, who refuse to find this world a fit abode for the spirit and turn inward to their own sacred consciousness. From the beginning of the novel, Haze is defined in terms of his eyes, which are usually averted or fixed in a rigid stare. As Sabbath Hawkes says, “they don't look like they see what he's looking at but they keep on looking” (p. 62). Although he insists that he has eyes in his head and assures himself that he will not need his mother's glasses, unless “his vision should ever become dim” (p. 18), Haze knows that he is missing something and senses that it lies behind the black glasses that Asa Hawkes wears over his scarred eyes. But his vision cannot be restored until his own eyes are burned clean.

By the time that O'Connor had come to write The Violent Bear It Away, her antagonism towards the modern spirit had, if anything, deepened. As a result, Young Tarwater's rebellion against God is even more clearly romantic and Manichean in character than that of Hazel Motes. From the start, Tarwater resents that his freedom has “to be connected with Christ” (p. 315), for like Haze, he sees Christ as a threat to his own personal destiny. His image of himself is stricken, when he confronts the fate of being one of Christ's lesser prophets. There is nothing remarkable in “trudging in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus” (p. 357), and Tarwater has to be remarkable. The only signs that interest him are those that “set his existence apart from the ordinary” (p. 327). He wants to “set the city astir,” do “something to make every eye stick” on him (p. 319). The final reach of his egoism is to become his own creator and savior. He resists all those who would be his father because he insists on being self-conceived and self-created. Like Rayber, but with a far more violent will, Tarwater demands to be born again, in a way that he can “accomplish” himself (p. 417). He must act out his rebellion against God so that he can be in charge of his “own bidness” (p. 428), free “forever to his own inclinations” (p. 435).

Tarwater's first acts of rebellion are meant to establish exclusive sovereignty to his familiar piece of ground. Like Hazel Motes, he believes that he can claim that country which has never “budged from its first allegiance in the days of creation” (p. 412). But in asserting that he owns Powderhead, he inevitably loses it, along with the possibility of ever being at home anywhere. Instead of possessing, he is himself possessed, by the voice of the stranger within. Powderhead becomes an empty place (p. 324). As Tarwater follows his course towards the final act of negation, his native acres loom “strange and alien,” a sign of his “broken covenant.” Powderhead is “forsaken and his own” (pp. 442, 444).

In attempting to achieve himself and his own exclusive place, Young Tarwater declares the superiority of his will to the claims of creation. He would be independent of any form of kinship with others or with the things of this world. From the beginning, he wears “his isolation like a mantle” of election (p. 370). He cannot abide the thought that God might show His presence in any “fleshly hand or breath” (p. 316) and looks at things with the “noncommital eye” of one who finds “nothing here worth holding his attention” (p. 360). Not even the sins of the flesh, which might look like a refuge from God, attract him. In surrendering to his urge for withdrawal, Tarwater moves towards the chosen destiny of Rayber, the arch-Manichean who has transformed the rage of Tarwater's rebellion into a cold, hard intellectual position. Rayber finds that being nearly blind and deaf are an advantage against the intrusion of reality. As old Tarwater recognizes, he wants to reduce creation to a set of abstractions that he can control inside the “switchbox” of his head. He triumphs in achieving the pure indifference of the objective observer who knows that “life has never been good enough … to wince at its destruction” (p. 421). In the death of his son, Bishop, he meets the final test of his indifference.

Young Tarwater's rejection of the bonds of human kinship is also put to the test by Bishop. From the start, Tarwater wants a state of moral laissez-faire: “nobody owing nobody nothing.” He sees in Bishop the hideousness of mortal flesh: “He's like a hog. … He eats like a hog and he don't think no more than a hog and when he dies, he'll rot like a hog” (p. 74). But Tarwater's fear and resentment of Bishop have a deeper source. He is personally insulted by the suspicion that a soul may be hiding in Bishop's imperfect flesh. If Bishop has a soul, Tarwater's quest is futile. He can have no separate destiny if the “hog” is his brother in God.

In order to resist this message of spiritual kinship, Tarwater must prevent himself from looking at Bishop or rather into him. Like Hazel Motes, he must put out his own spiritual vision, force his eyes “to stop at the surface” of things to avoid the threatened “intimacy of creation” (p. 316). Nowhere is this intimacy more threatening than in the eyes of Bishop. And just as Tarwater cannot bear looking into creation, he cannot bear creation looking into him. After he sets fire to Powderhead, he is terrified that some moral presence brooding upon the universe may have observed his transgression. The stars seem “to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him” (p. 354). The same light stares out of Bishop's eyes, demanding to be recognized and named. Through most of the novel, Tarwater tries to deny the light by avoiding Bishop's gaze, but, unlike Rayber, he has the courage of the violent and must finally act out his damnation or redemption. As the moment of will approaches, he turns the “steel-like glint” of his eyes directly into Bishop (p. 407). He knows exactly what he is doing. With his eyes “open wide,” he stares through the “bottomless darkness,” into the “light silent eyes of the child across from him” (p. 431). He murders Bishop, but it is God's image upon creation that he wants to kill. In one final act, he would put out the light behind every eye. Overhead the sky watches, “dotted with fixed tranquil eyes like the spread tail of some celestial night bird” (p. 432).

If Hazel Motes and Francis Tarwater both begin as romantic rebels with a strong Manichean urge to escape from created reality, O'Connor will not allow them to die within the walls of their own refusal. She rejects alienation as a necessity, much less as an ideal, and her rejection of it goes much deeper than a commitment to a purely social or secular responsibility. It grows out of her belief in the inherent human spirit. She insists that there can be no need for the individual to create his soul; it is given once and for all to each. The soul can never be the basis of an exclusively personal distinction, just as it can never serve the ego or sublimate the ego's demand to some transcendent end. The burden is exactly the opposite. The soul is the destruction of a merely personal self, the defeat of any hope of an individual distinction that might justify being; for it is the inherent image of God upon each man, binding him to the mystery of creation and to all other men in kinship under God. While the individual has infinite worth, it does not rest upon that which separates him from others but upon that which joins him to the Universal.

Just as O'Connor's belief in the soul forces her to reject the romantic version of the spiritual hero, it puts her at odds with the romantic figure of the artist that she saw as the central inheritance of our novelists. For O'Connor, the artist is not a creature of aesthetic sensibility but of prophetic vision.¹⁸ The artist is not spiritually set apart and can have no need to establish his or her essential uniqueness. As O'Connor says in one of her letters, “the true poet is anonymous.”¹⁹ While he or she may judge society by a moral standard that it cannot or will not live up to, the true artist has no irreconcilable conflict with the ordinary world because, unlike the romantic artist, true artists do not see themselves as embodiments of spiritual or intellectual order, surrounded by a chaotic or moribund reality. Every true artist shares Moses Herzog's discovery that he does not have to hold reality together; it is held for him. The “artist dreams no dreams” of order;²⁰ he “penetrates the concrete world … to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality.”²¹ He cannot turn from material reality for the very reason that his work is the “accurate naming of the things of God.”²²

The final chapters of Wise Blood are so twisted in irony and paradox that the reader has a hard time seeing just how Hazel Motes escapes from his spiritual isolation and reaches any state of prophetic vision. However, it is clear that whatever recovery Hazel makes results from the destruction of his image of himself as his own creator and redeemer.

In the course of the novel, there are a number of scenes in which Haze is pushed to the edge of vision, but his conversion and rebirth explode upon him in chapter thirteen. He sets out to kill, once and forever, that “false” part of himself which threatens to make a mockery of his life of denial. In Solace Layfield he finds that false self, where belief still hides in spite of all the preaching to the contrary. Haze strips Layfield naked, forces him to acknowledge Christ, and then with his old Essex, the emblem of his impregnable self, he knocks Layfield flat. But Haze cannot sacrifice his bad faith with Layfield's blood. He squats beside the dying man and in a gesture totally in opposition to his conscious will, leans “his head closer to hear [Layfield's] confession” (p. 111). While Haze acknowledges his own belief in the soul and his spiritual kinship with his victim, he is scarcely aware of having done so. He wipes away the blood and makes plans to open a new branch of his Church Without Christ. He still has his car and a “lightning bolt couldn't stop it” (p. 112).

As O'Connor explains, Haze cannot “escape his predicament until the car is destroyed by the patrolman.”²³ For all his perversity, the patrolman is an agent of Haze's salvation. Just before he pushes the Essex over the embankment, he explains that Haze is about to see “the puttiest view [he] ever did see.” All he has to do is get out of his car, and he will “be able to see better” (p. 113). After Haze surveys the fragments of his car, coming to rest thirty feet below him in the red clay, his eyes do open:

Haze stood for a few minutes, looking over at the scene. His face seemed to reflect the entire distance across the clearing and on beyond, the entire distance that extended from his eyes to the blank gray sky that went on, depth after depth, into space.”

(p. 104)

This quiet instant is the spiritual climax of Haze's whole life. He is delivered from the confines of his own ego-bound self. His eyes penetrate the concrete scene around him, move through the “blank gray sky” and reach towards infinite space. For a few minutes he “escape[s] his predicament” and is released into what had been an alien world. His face seems “to reflect … the entire distance” extending outward from his eyes. We have no way of knowing what image of the source or ultimate reality Haze may have found in the depths. We are left with the effects. Haze confesses to the policeman that his car was not really taking him anywhere and then walks back to town to prepare his bucket of quick lime.

In the final chapter, Haze is carried away from us, as the point of view abruptly shifts to the consciousness of his landlady, Mrs. Flood. She initially sees Haze as a man who has lost his connection with the real world, a spiritual lunatic who “might as well be in a monkery” (p. 19). While Mrs. Flood appears to be nearly a moral imbecile, there is at least a certain confusion of truth in her first impressions of Haze. In obvious ways he is still disconnected from the concrete world. He wants “to go on where [he's] going” (p. 126). His attention is “directed elsewhere,” and the material world is an “interruption” along the way to eternity (p. 121). In blinding himself, Haze hits upon the perfect symbolic act to reveal the paradox of his spiritual life. In order to atone for refusing to look beneath the surface of things, he has to sacrifice his capacity to see the surface of things. Except for that brief moment at the edge, Haze never fully possesses the prophet's eye, which sees into the mystery of the spirit within the things of this world. He never consciously acknowledges God's image in the face of another human being, which is the surest sign of the limitation of his vision. O'Connor clearly recognizes this limitation in her hero. As she indicates in one of her letters: “he put lye in his eyes … which left him in no state to practice charity.”²⁴

But if Haze has only a moment in which to see, he commits what remains of his life to it. In the darkness of his skull, he follows the “pin point of light” backwards to Bethlehem (p. 119). And while he cannot offer charity, he apparently becomes the offering. In the end, Mrs. Flood is as transfixed in Haze's eyes as he once was in Asa Hawke's:

She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn't begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.

(p. 126)

While there are important similarities in the conclusions of the two novels, The Violent Bear It Away is more clearly and fully resolved than Wise Blood. Like Hazel Motes, Young Tarwater tries to kill his own belief as it is reflected in the face of another, and like Hazel he fails because he cannot silence something in himself that is deeper than his conscious will to damnation. He can follow his rebellion to the point of drowning Bishop, but he cannot prevent the words of the Baptism from running out of his mouth and spilling in the water (p. 428). He is humiliated because this unconscious acknowledgment of his belief in the immortal soul has stained the purity of his final act of negation. Just as Haze retreats to the safety of his car after “accidentally” receiving his victim's last confession, Tarwater tries to hide from the meaning of his baptizing of Bishop. He desperately wants to remain spiritually blind because it is the only thing that will keep him safe from the “threatened intimacy of creation.” It is not the consequences of damnation that he fears, but the consequences of redemption. After murdering Bishop, he continually has to shut his eyes against the light, but he cannot put out his inner eye, which remains rigidly open upon that “silent country” where God dwells in his creation (p. 434).

Tarwater can only be released from his defenses through the annihilation of that part of himself that would be sovereign and alone, “clean” in the sense that both Hemingway and Sartre use the term. The lavender stranger who rapes Tarwater, like the patrolman who wrecks Haze's Essex, is a Satanic figure doomed to further God's work. He leaves Tarwater unconscious and stripped forever of the illusion of being the sole master of his “own bidness.” When Tarwater awakens in the spent sunlight, his eyes look “small and seedlike as if while he was asleep, they had been lifted out, scorched, and dropped back into his head” (p. 441). His scorched eyes have “been touched with a coal like the lips of the prophet,” and they are ready for the “final revelation” (p. 442).

While Tarwater shares the gift of prophetic vision with Hazel Motes, he penetrates the concrete world in more depth than Haze does. Also, he is released into creation by his final revelation in a way that is denied to Hazel Motes. When Tarwater returns to Powderhead, he senses a “strangeness about the place, as if there might already be an occupant.” The natural world seems to be hushed in “deference to some mystery that resided here” (p. 445). As he approaches his great uncle's grave, he begins to see through to that mystery which lives in creation: “Nothing seemed alive about the boy but his eyes and they stared downward at the cross as if they followed below the surface of the earth to where its roots encircled all the dead” (p. 446). When he lifts his eyes beyond the grave, his vision seems “to pierce the very air” and he surrenders to the terrible kinship of the created:

The boy remained standing there, his still eyes reflecting the field. … It seemed to him no longer empty but peopled with a multitude. Everywhere, he saw dim figures seated on the slope and as he gazed he saw that from a single basket the throng was being fed.

(p. 446)

In this final scene, Tarwater literally becomes the seer; he sees through those walls that seem to imprison this world. His eyes stare through the surface of the earth, pierce the air, and what they find is the commonplace mystery of one ordinary bread that feeds all things. The illusion of a separate fate, which empties creation, dissolves into the vision of the multitude, bound and encircled in God's making. As one of the unclean, Tarwater anoints himself with dirt and moves steadily towards the “dark City,” where the “children of God,” his true kin, are waiting to anoint him with blood.

The world of likeness that Tarwater finally sees into contains all of O'Connor's work. She has been accused of using religion as a spiritual retreat from material reality, but to the contrary she insists that all retreats are futile, whether they be spiritual or material. Indeed her conflict with the modern consciousness, especially as it expresses itself in literature, springs from her conviction that modernism commits the spirit or mind to perpetual flight from creation. For O'Connor the sense of alienation so pervasive in our time inevitably results from the Manichean urge to find a refuge in the enclosed mind. It follows that her case against this modern predisposition is perceptual rather than intellectual. It rests upon the power of her vision and ultimately upon her capacity to restore us to full sight. She does not offer the consolations of a theology or even of religion, so much as she seeks to melt the modern glance, frozen in objectivity, detachment, indifference. To share her vision we must be willing to look for the spirit and the flesh orbiting together in the familiar circles of the idiot's eye.

Notes

1. Flannery O'Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners (New York, 1961), p. 68.

2. O'Connor, “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 147.

3. O'Connor, “A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 108.

4. O'Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 39.

5. O'Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” p. 79.

6. Ibid., p. 70.

7. O'Connor, “The Regional Writer,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 52.

8. O'Connor, “The Catholic Novelist and the Protestant South,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 199.

9. O'Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” in Mystery and Manners, p. 158.

10. O'Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” p. 68.

11. O'Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New York, 1979), p. 403. While O'Connor's analysis of the Manichean is most fully developed in her two novels, she endows many of the central characters of her short stories with the same qualities that poison Hazel Motes and Tarwater. The first to come to mind are The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Hulga in “Good Country People,” Nelson and Mr. Head in “The Artificial Nigger,” Asbury in “The Enduring Chill,” and Mr. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”

12. O'Connor, Wise Blood, in Three by Flannery O'Connor (New York, n.d.), p. 16. Subsequent references to Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away are to this edition and will appear in the text.

13. For discussions of the theme of alienation in Wise Blood see Sister Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock (New Brunswick, N.J., 1972), pp. 57 ff., and Josephine Hendin, The World of Flannery O'Connor (Bloomington, Ind., 1970), pp. 47 ff.

14. A number of critics have examined the imagery of entrapment in Wise Blood. For example, see Irving Malin, “Flannery O'Connor and the Grotesque,” in The Added Dimension, ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (New York, 1966), pp. 110-11, and Hendin, pp. 39-41.

15. O'Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” p. 72.

16. Several critics have analyzed the theme of blindness in the novel. For example, see Patricia Maida, “Light and Enlightenment in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction,” Studies in Short Fiction 13 (Winter, 1976), 31-6; Dorothy Walters, Flannery O'Connor (New York, 1973), pp. 44-5, 91-2; and Leon V. Driskell and Joan Brittain, The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor (Lexington, 1971), pp. 40-1.

17. O'Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” p. 157.

18. A number of critics discuss the relationship of the artist and prophet, which is fundamental to O'Connor's outlook. For example, see Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, “Flannery O'Connor, a Realist of Distances,” in The Added Dimension, pp. 157-83; P. Albert Duhamel, “The Novelist as Prophet,” in The Added Dimension, pp. 88-107; Gilbert Muller, Nightmares and Visions (Athens, 1972), pp. 108-9; and Feeley, pp. 141 ff.

19. O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 337.

20. Ibid., p. 216.

21. O'Connor, “Novelist and Believer,” p. 157.

22. O'Connor, The Habit of Being, pp. 126, 128.

23. O'Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” p. 72.

24. O'Connor, The Habit of Being, p. 301.