The Queer Eye of Flannery O’Connor

 

Flannery O’Connor was not an American but a southern American. Moreover she was not an author but a woman author. Nor was she a Christian but a Catholic Christian in the land of the Mayflower and the ferociously anti-Catholic Klan. Indeed, I was wrong. She was not a woman author but a quite-possibly -queer woman author (as far as her limited romantic experience went). To this we might add ‘disabled’ (by lupus) if, in contemporary fashion, we wished to form an extended compound like ‘disabled-lesbian-female-southern-catholic-writer’. Of course, Flannery O’Connor was also white. This is one bit of sameness this heavily othered author seems to have clung to in spite of what may have been her better judgment. Her core ‘eye’ is that of a white southerner who regards both the racial attitudes of her ‘folk’ and their ‘negro’ victims with detached bemusement rather than outrage. This makes here a new kind of ‘other’ where a 21st century progressive readership is concerned for it seems to us an author should observe the world so closely primarily to change it: something about which O’Connor was diffident at best. The hierarchies, racial and social, of southern society fed her imagination though even she seemed to recognize they could not and should not last. Being a perfect mirror of one segment of one’s world can come at the cost of the bigger picture. Nothing fails like success or, to put it another way, every success is paid for.[1]  

                It seems then that one could scarcely be queerer than this if we take the word queer in its broadest sense. Queerness has its advantages and disadvantages. The marginal perspective can be as blind and partial as any other but clairvoyant in its vision of the normal, especially with respect to its assumed privileges. Assumed privileges are something you can only see if you don’t benefit from them. The queer author, in this expanded sense, can put herself out of the way and turn to the things themselves (to the extent any human can do this) because she does not have a central or crucial self where her social and intellectual world is concerned. There is, as I noted, fiction and catholic fiction. There is fiction and female fiction. There is fiction and gay fiction. There is fiction and southern gothic fiction! This is why a female author can write about fathers and sons as well or better than any male as O’Connor does in the opening pages of her last novel The Violent Bear it Away. Negative capability (the ability to exist in a state of suspension) is a priceless aesthetic gift whatever else it may cost. The same goes for her uncanny ability to get in the heads of Southern Protestants who would regard her as bound in priestly darkness (among other horrors). I tend to think it a considerable achievement to maintain a critical sympathy with people who, if sufficiently aroused, would burn down your house in a religious riot. 

Part of queerness is stubborn particularity that holds on to human difference. Queerness is anti-totalizing and anti-utopian. In some respects this is not a good thing. It involves erecting barriers to save the individual from the surrounding ‘they’. I suspect some of O’Connor’s ambivalence about race is indeed found in the sin of separateness: the desire to erect a wall between self and other due to fear of domination and absorption. From this standpoint one might end up a ‘heretic’ in the root sense of that word. One might end up a church of one like the hapless Mason Tarwater, preaching to an audience he has literally kidnapped!  At same time, however, and according to a doctrine we both share, every evil is grounded in some good. The artist above all has certain duties of self-preservation as carrying a vision, a sensibility, a way of seeing, not reducible to anyone else’s. The artist is guardian of a difference. This difference is a stubborn one and an artist may be tempted to great foolishness and even crime in its defense.


[1] I don’t personally dwell on Flannery O’Connor’s racial attitudes OR her sexuality because, to be frank, she is dead. As I share her basic beliefs about the world I would say, as she would, that she has discussed both these matters with a judge stricter and fairer than I could ever be. This is what, in general, keeps me from moralizing over the dead to the extent that that can be avoided. “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord”: without the symbol of a divine tribunal to deflect and displace human judgment I suppose aggressive moralizing and unending judgment of the dead is our only realistic stance if we still have a basic human concern for righting wrongs. That is why I am glad it is a functioning symbol for me as life would be a much duller grind from the other standpoint. If I judged human beings, I would over condemn here and under condemn there and leaven none of it with the proper degree of mercy. For that reason, I am glad it is not my responsibility. 

 

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