SOURCE: Spivey, Ted R. “Flannery O'Connor, The New Criticism, and Deconstruction.” Southern Review 23, no. 2 (April 1987): 271-80.

[In the following essay, Spivey encourages various critical perspectives on O'Connor's work, contending that relying on only one will result in a limited and one-sided view of her fiction.]

Since Flannery O'Conner's death in 1964, her work, like Faulkner's, has attracted the attention of critics and scholars throughout the world. In fact, she is now generally acclaimed as the modern South's greatest novelist after Faulkner. Yet we may well ask if both Faulkner and O'Connor, for all the excellent criticism their work has received, do not still await adequate examination in the context of their thought and their total life experience.

One aspect of O'Connor that requires our attention is her own concern with the many aspects of meaning in her work; it is for this reason, among many others, that her letters are so important to those who would understand her and would experience her imaginative power. In a sense, O'Connor was an intertextual critic long before the appearance of deconstructive criticism. Writing about deconstruction and semiotics, Jonathan Culler recommends an intertextual approach that relates literary to nonliterary texts for the following reason: “Since students do not take for granted that literature is something they ought to study, teachers have to be able to relate literature to what they do take for granted or to alternative accounts of human experience in order to make apparent the virtues of literature as an object of study and a source of pleasure.” O'Connor believed that everyone, not just college students, needed teaching, and that the critic as well as the creative writer could take part in a form of teaching that relates literature, philosophy, theology, religion, history, and psychology. The new critics of the eighties, Culler says, steeped in the views of semiotics and deconstruction, are “able to discuss literature in its relations to more familiar cultural products and in its relations to other ways of writing about human experience, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history.” Both O'Connor's letters and fiction reveal a concern with the kind of interrelationship of texts Culler suggests. Indeed, my own friendship with O'Connor from 1958 until her death in 1964 was based in large part on discussions about connections among books on philosophy, theology, psychology, and mythology that we had exchanged.

My first concern in writing critically about O'Connor's work was the fear of becoming caught up in the intentional fallacy. Because I had talked with the author about her literary intentions and about her religious and philosophical views, I wondered if I could work very well within the tradition of the New Criticism that I had inherited and still very much believed in. Furthermore, I was not really sure I understood certain aspects of O'Connor's work. When The Violent Bear It Away appeared, I was greatly impressed with its imaginative power, but certain aspects of its meaning escaped me. I began to understand this novel's chief theme when I first read in the summer issue of the Sewanee Review O'Connor's novella entitled “The Lame Shall Enter First.” I was also struck by John Hawkes's article in the same issue for the reason that the role of the devil, which Hawkes believed was central to her work as an artist, was essential in understanding her second novel and the novella which followed. I wrote an essay on “The Lame Shall Enter First” and her reply of January 27, 1963, was heartening. Her letter began: “You have certainly got my intention down on this story. I'm not sure myself that I carried out the intention dramatically so well. To tell the truth, I haven't read the story over since it was published because I didn't want to be confronted too strongly with my failure with it: also I am still too close to it, but your analysis is cheering and makes me feel I'll be able to read it soon.” O'Connor not only went on in the letter to offer her criticism of the article, suggesting a few changes, which I made, but she also advised me where to try it:

I guess the South Atlantic would be a good place to send it since you know somebody there, or maybe the Ga. Review or maybe the Sewanee, since this has considerable to do with the devil and they have already published one thing about me and the devil which was pretty off-center as far as I am concerned.

After being rejected by the Sewanee, with an encouraging note from the editor, Andrew Lytle, the article appeared in Studies in Short Fiction in 1964 and was reprinted in 1968 in a collection of essays from the B. Herder Book Co. of St. Louis entitled Flannery O'Connor.

Flannery's letter to me concerning my article was an encouraging as any letter from a writer to a critic could be. The concluding paragraph led me to resolve to continue my own study of her work for the rest of my life. She went on to say quite simply: “I do thank you for writing this. It's a great help to know that somebody understands what I am after [sic] doing.”

My own previous immersion in the New Criticism still made me worry about trying to understand O'Connor's intentions and about what might appear to some to be too much personal involvement by both the writer and the critic in the process of criticism. Yet one of the values Flannery most often spoke up for in all of her writing, particularly in her letters, was the necessity of taking into account the personal factor in all activities. Her writing, including much of her best fiction, continually warned against the increasing emphasis in the modern world on the abstract and the impersonal. In this matter she reminds us of Jacques Derrida's attack on logocentrism. I began to ask myself at this time if the New Criticism had not always placed too much emphasis, in its efforts to rid the world of impressionistic and moralistic criticism, on an impersonal, objective analysis of meaning and form in individual work. I think even then my mind was moving toward the kind of criticism that in the eighties has become dominant in academic circles. Flannery would not have agreed with certain aspects of deconstruction, but I think she would have wholeheartedly endorsed the concept of intertextuality and the opposition to logocentrism. She was intensely concerned with the interrelationship among many kinds of texts—being interested not only in the usual kinds of literary, sociological, psychological, philosophical, and historical texts but also in letters, newspaper advertisements, and comic strips as texts.

An example of O'Connor's use of a nonliterary text in her work is her fictional use of an advertisement taken out regularly in an Atlanta newspaper by a religious fundamentalist. The advertisement always bore this title: “Why Do the Heathen Rage?” In an expanded version of my first essay, originally given as a lecture at Georgia State College and eventually published in a booklet entitled The Humanities in the Contemporary South, I mentioned the fact that Why Do the Heathen Rage? was the tentative title for the new novel she was working on when she died, part of which appeared in Esquire in the summer of 1963. She and I had several times discussed the advertisement, and I think she must have liked my referring to it in the expanded essay, which I read as part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Georgia State University's founding. In February 1964, she wrote to Louise Abbot concerning the new version of the original article: “He [Spivey] sent me a paper on my stuff which he read recently at Georgia State. I liked it very much, much more than the last one. It seemed better put together, maybe because it had to be spoken.” I would not know about this remark until Sally Fitzgerald's edition of the letters appeared in print.

After more than twenty-five years of studying Flannery O'Connor's work, I have concluded that, as important as the New Criticism is for studying her work, deconstructive and biographical criticism can also provide important insights into her often difficult art. The New Critics, of course, minimized the role of biographical facts in criticism, but unless one understands O'Connor's involvement in intellectual concerns and influences on her work stemming from a variety of texts, there is the danger that she will be seen as no more than a writer in the southern Gothic tradition, or, at best, as a novelist of manners who gave a Gothic twist to social satire. Seeing O'Connor through the eyes of the deconstructionists, using the concepts of intertextuality and logocentrism, will help readers understand how much she sought to avoid the influence of writers like Faulkner and Welty, both of whom she admired. To see O'Connor in intertextual terms, one must consider Nathanael West, an atypical writer of the thirties who first found an audience in the fifties. West gave O'Connor a vision of what could be accomplished technically in a new kind of ironic short fiction. Robert Fitzgerald tells us that O'Connor urged on him only two books—As I Lay Dying and Miss Lonelyhearts—and that “it is pretty clear from her work that they were close to her heart as a writer.” What drew O'Connor to West's Miss Lonelyhearts was its brevity, its concentrated irony, and its power to shock the reader out of his complacency. West gave O'Connor a vision of the collapse of logocentric attitudes in modern America and helped her to achieve a kind of vision not found earlier in southern fiction.

As for the influence of other novelists, she told me in 1958 that more than anyone else it came from two French authors, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac. These two authors, for her, were the chief figures in the modern Catholic literary tradition. For instance, she tells Father John McCown in a letter that “anybody who wants to be introduced to Catholic fiction will have to start with the French—Mauriac and Bernanos.” She also admired, she tells Father McCown, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, J. F. Powers, Walker Percy, and Wilfred Sheed. The one book by a Catholic author she insisted that I read was Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest. In a letter to the correspondent “A” she writes: “Also reading a book called The Eclipse of God by Martin Buber that Dr. Spivey sent me. I have introduced him to Bernanos whom he likes.” Flannery O'Connor was puzzling to many because her interest in intellectual Catholicism and her prophetic viewpoint placed her in both the past and the immediate future. To understand the O'Connor who belongs to the future we need the deconstructionist viewpoint because O'Connor seems in her fiction to cry out prophetically, as much as Derrida himself, against logocentrism. Yet as a daily reader of Aquinas, O'Connor sought intertextual links with her own religious heritage and with that medieval theologian who helped to launch the logocentric rationalism of the West, the demise of which the author's best work often records detail.

Because of the paradoxes of O'Connor's fictional vision, a deconstructionist view of her work is inevitable. She has in all of her humanity not yet been deeply studied, though Fitzgerald's edition of her letters is opening new doors to scholars and readers who would know her better. The New Criticism is partly responsible for this. O'Connor knew well several archons of this tradition, chiefly John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon. But the New Criticism in estimating her work never took into full account her devotion to West nor did it consider O'Connor as a woman of letters; chiefly, however, the New Critics seemed unaware of her view of the action of grace that could shatter all logocentric viewpoints.

Another significant reason why her attack on logocentrism has been ignored is the action of the public press, which often has tried to see her as a recluse who wrote in the mode of the southern Gothic. The danger is that she might eventually be summed up by journalistic slogans that even exhaustive biographies like the one Sally Fitzgerald is writing cannot dispel. William Faulkner became in the hands of journalists the Sage of Yoknapatawpha County at a time when, though a Nobel Prize winner, he was struggling with alcoholism. What is needed to dispel the inevitable influence of journalistic criticism is an understanding of both the deconstructive and the traditionalist sides of Flannery O'Connor. I think we must avoid Sally Fitzgerald's belief, expressed in her introduction to the letters, that there is “one true likeness of O'Connor.” No one likeness of any writer exists, no matter how good her letters were. There is much that she spoke in conversation to me and to others that does not appear in her letters. There is much in her fiction that is unlike anything she ever wrote, spoke, or even understood.

Flannery O'Connor was fortunate in knowing both Sally Fitzgerald and her husband Robert, and she was also fortunate to have the friendship of Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Caroline Gordon, and Katherine Anne Porter. As a young woman she found a literary tradition waiting for her, one that included the New Criticism, and she stepped into it with understanding but also with restlessness and pain. The restlessness and pain she kept from the older generation and sometimes even from herself. She often, I think, repressed an anger toward a logocentric intellectual tradition that she also studiously cultivated. The same may be said of her attitude toward the South. For instance, Fitzgerald says that “it is clear from her correspondence that she cherished” her life in the South. Yet I have heard her complain bitterly of the South and say she wished she were living again in New York. She benefited from knowing Agrarians like Ransom, Tate, and Gordon; but she was only in part an Agrarian, even though she lived on a farm much of her creative life. Like the Agrarians, she sought to maintain the values of a southern culture based in large part on agriculture, but she was in her fiction the prophet of an age that has now replaced the Agrarian South, that of the sprawling modern city. Thus in many ways she was two people.

I once told Flannery of a dream I had had of her being a middle-aged woman of letters, very well dressed and magisterial; yet in a back room in the dream she kept locked another side of herself, who was Carson McCullers dressed in blue jeans. Ever since I had first met her in 1958, she had told me how much she disliked Carson McCullers' writing. I never heard her give a reasoned statement concerning her critical views of McCullers, nor is there one in her letters. Yet as she grew older her prejudice against McCullers seemed to grow stronger. In 1961 she wrote in a letter of McCullers' last book, Clock Without Hands, that “I believe it is the worst book I have ever read.” Of this book she told me she believed it was the worst book “in the history of man.” In 1963 she would write in a letter: “I dislike intensely the work of Carson McCullers.” Nevertheless, a deconstructive spirit similar to McCullers' can be found in her work. When I told her of my dream, she almost gave assent, though she did not speak.

O'Connor was always drawn to the stability that still existed in southern culture, to people like Ransom, the acknowledged leader of the Agrarian tradition of southern literature and one of the founding fathers of the New Criticism. Ransom, on the other hand, knew that he had found in O'Connor a writer worthy of carrying on many of the concepts honored by the Agrarians. In his late seventies Ransom gave public lectures on her work; yet he understood only one aspect of her fiction, that side of her that clung to the stability of a declining social order. The Agrarians believed that southern culture contained values which sprang from the acceptance of a tragedy not known by other Americans and from relationships with nature and inherited religion. O'Connor agreed with this viewpoint, but another side of her psyche fully accepted the growing cultural disorganization of the modern South. She saw personal disintegration everywhere in the years after World War II and recorded her awareness of this disintegration in all her best work, beginning with Wise Blood.

O'Connor often wrote and spoke like an Agrarian, but in conversation with someone like me, born two years later than herself in 1927, she revealed emotion and thoughts at variance with Agrarian viewpoints. She told me in 1958, for instance, that her writing was not understood by many people but that the best letters about her work came from penitentiaries. She understood the criminal mind, and she believed that people born after World War I often had hidden criminal characteristics found only occasionally in people born earlier. Her work in part is a deconstruction of principles and concepts that had once served older, stable societies, but which seemed meaningless to individuals, like Haze Motes in Wise Blood, who believed that possessing an automobile rendered theological concepts unnecessary.

O'Connor belongs in many ways to the decade of the fifties, the last fully stable decade of Western Civilization, the last that could maintain a logocentric viewpoint. In this decade an artificial stasis existed that hid a continuing cultural collapse. This in fact is the underlying situation of most of her best stories. In “The Artificial Nigger,” “The Displaced Person,” and “Revelation” a middle-aged individual has created a stasis that is upset by a young person alienated from all systems. Sometimes the result is comic but more often it is tragic. She dramatized the struggle of age and youth as a representative of both sides. O'Connor thus held in tension two ways of life within her psyche, but she tended to repress the rebellious side that sought to overthrow old systems. Her partial repression of a hidden anger toward logocentric systems might account for the depression that helped to cause her death. Her physical problems aggravated the depression, but they were not, necessarily, the cause of it.

Possibly the saddest sentence in all of O'Connor's letters was one written in her last year to Sr. Mariella Gable: “I've been writing eighteen years and I've reached the point where I can't do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.” She had obviously reached that period of depression many artists experience as middle age approaches. T. S. Eliot, for instance, thought he had lost his poetic gift in the early nineteen-thirties, but he found a new creative life in the poetic drama and in the composition of the Quartets. From the conversations I had with Flannery in the late fifties and early sixties I noted a search for deeper understanding of the new decade, which some of her best work brought into focus. Yet O'Connor's last letter, written to Maryat Lee and signed “Tarfunk,” reveals her state of mind in her last days. Tarwater was the name she gave the protagonist of her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, and it stands for the traditional religious view of the human nature as consisting of the water of life and the black tar of destructiveness, represented by the Devil in traditional theology and by the Jungian archetype of the shadow. To call herself Tarfunk is to admit that her shadow side and the state of funk—caused, in part, by inner panic at being unable to carry on her rigorous writing discipline—had become an important element in her life.

The roots of O'Connor's depression are not easy to discover, but they are, in an intertextual manner, related to the whole tradition of southern letters. She several times mentioned to me how much Poe meant to her. The one reference to Poe in her letters is to the volume The Humorous Tales of E. A. Poe. “This is an influence I would rather not think of,” she wrote. As a traditionalist, O'Connor was immersed in southern culture with its stoicism, religiosity, and exaggerated respect for European culture. Poe represented for her these aspects of the South, but he also stood for a southern violence that threatens all cultural restraints. Poe's mingling of the humorous and the horrible undoubtedly found its way into stories like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Like Poe she was deeply concerned with form in literature, but like Faulkner she was caught up in the turmoil of southern culture without being able to throw off the burdens of that turmoil. Her well-regulated life and her concern for artistic form indicate that she made powerful and stoical efforts to achieve both a personal and an artistic control. Her search for artistic control grew in part out of her deep awareness of the New Criticism and its concern with structure and texture. Yet much in her best writing cries out against her own control over her fictional material. “Deconstruction is decomposition,” Derrida thus succinctly defined deconstruction in a speech given at Georgia State University in September 1985. I have thought since hearing this pointed remark that O'Connor was seeking, quite unconsciously most of the time, to decompose her own view of the world, if not her style, in order to exorcise from her mind a logocentrism that governed many aspects of her life and work. These unconscious efforts sprang in part from her perception of profound changes in American culture.

The cultural unity of America was breaking up in the early sixties, and the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson paralleled the collapse of southern culture into a megalopolitan sprawl. O'Connor, politically liberal on many subjects, welcomed changes like those in the area of civil rights; yet she was inwardly amazed at cultural collapse all around her. As a visionary writer she foresaw much that would happen in the psyches of young people in the latter half of the twentieth century; nevertheless, as a woman of letters following in the footsteps of Caroline Gordon in particular, and of the Agrarians in general, she clung to images of a way of life rapidly dying. Her early attachment to the Agrarians might have hindered her own acceptance of psychic changes going on within herself. The Agrarians were sometimes rigid in their viewpoints. The one thing O'Connor needed above all was less rigidity of viewpoint, less of the logocentrism in herself and her work that she sometimes clung to and yet distrusted.

The Agrarians embraced O'Connor because they recognized her genius, but they also took her to be a writer like themselves. O'Connor, however, knew that her philosophical and fictional vision derived in many ways from a disintegrating Western tradition and from a religious response to that disintegration. The South was the necessary background for her worldwide vision of the eclipse of God (to use Buber's term) taking place within young people at war within themselves and with their elders. To read O'Connor with a deconstructionist viewpoint is to encounter a largely suppressed vision, one that appeared in the late sixties and was largely denied in the seventies, a decade that officially proclaimed itself to be like the fifties. This vision is that of a strong yearning for cultural renewal. How O'Connor deals with what is possibly the emergence of cultural renewal in America in the late twentieth century is, along with her deconstructive insights, the subject of much of her work.

During her lifetime most critics thought of O'Connor as one of many important new writers of the fifties; she is now thought by some critics to be the profoundest writer of her sex in this century. Inevitably, critics now view her work from a large number of viewpoints. By the end of the seventies Robert Coles was writing of her as if she were a literary sociologist; Sally Fitzgerald would explain that the blacks she knew “were as primitive as some of the Whites she wrote about, and they perhaps served as trees obscuring her view of the social forest” and that “perhaps … it was her well-met responsibility to her gift to give dignity and meaning to the lives of individuals who have far fewer champions, and enjoy considerably less sympathy, and are far lonelier than they.” Inevitably, many schools of criticism will find that their methods will help to explain her complex fiction. New Criticism and deconstruction and other schools yet to appear will struggle with her writing in order to discover new understanding and new imaginative power.

O'Connor, on the other hand, saw her work as a service to God. She was deeply aware of the prophetic element in her fiction. Marion Montgomery has demonstrated in the thirteen hundred pages of his trilogy, The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age, that she attacks the belief that through knowledge alone the good life could be brought into being. Her attitude towards social science, for instance, is often quoted:

In college I read works of social science, so-called. The only thing that kept me from being a social-scientist was the grace of God and the fact that I couldn't remember the stuff but a few days after reading it.

The social sciences provide much of the material that modern gnostics have used to create their logocentric construction of reality. Montgomery demonstrates how O'Connor's characters deconstruct many of these logocentric viewpoints. With the help of Eric Voegelin, Montgomery describes the “New Man” of modern gnosticism, who encounters an inevitable crossroads “that leads either to the divinization of man or the humanization of God.” O'Connor and I talked several times about Voegelin, and at her urging I read his work. Yet it must be noted that in her fiction she not only attacks the logocentric gnostics of the social sciences, but she also batters the logocentrism of Agrarian southerners. More often than not her target is a woman like Mrs. McIntyre in “The Displaced Person.” What Mrs. McIntyre has in common with the logocentric psychologist of “The Lame Shall Enter First” is a belief, above all else, in an artificial stasis. Her greatest fear is that Jesus, who according to the Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” had thrown everything off balance, will upset her Agrarian oasis. For O'Connor, as deconstructionist, the artificial stasis must at last collapse so that grace can descend. In a handful of her epiphanies grace does bring love and affirmation with the kind of benediction that occurs in Joyce's yes in Ulysses, that key word which Derrida has written about at great length.

O'Connor at her best reveals that opening in human affairs, created by grace, in which logocentrism collapses. Those of us, like O'Connor, who were once firmly entrenched in the New Criticism must now, in order to understand this grace shown in her art, turn to insights derived from the most significant critical movement of the past twenty years. O'Connor's fiction demands, because of the way she worked, the careful analysis that the New Critics inculcated; yet it also calls for that understanding of logocentrism and intertextuality that the deconstructionists have brought to the critical process. Surely her work is important enough to receive the careful attention of those who still work in the New Critical tradition as well as those who are now firmly entrenched in deconstruction.