ontological splendor: flannery o’connor in the protestant ... · ontological splendor: flannery...

the intercollegiate review Spring 2011 41

Toward the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor was often asked to speak

about being a Southerner, as though this were a peculiar condition in need of ex-planation. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” a composite es-say published from two of her last pub-lic talks, she sums up what she thinks of her region: “What has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scrip-tures and from her own history of defeat and violation: a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”1 Of these three dimensions of the South, “distrust of the abstract” might remain the one most in need of a defense, whether for the South, for O’Connor herself, or for literature as a mode of knowledge.

Before she died from lupus at the age of thirty-nine, O’Connor spent her last four-teen years writing fi ction and raising pea-cocks at her mother’s dairy farm outside Milledgeville, Georgia. Given her illness, she had a limited range of experiences to draw on for her fi ction, and her stories tend to focus repetitively on a few basic scenarios—often a mother who has to run the farm by herself, the tenants who are

supposed to help but who present prob-lems of their own, and a violent revelation. None more closely reproduces O’Connor’s own circumstances than “Good Country People.” The tenant woman who helps Mrs. Hopewell, Mrs. Freeman, stands in the kitchen “as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other,” and she has “a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable.”2

Mrs. Freeman takes particular pleasure in staring at Mrs. Hopewell’s daughter, thirty-two-year-old Hulga, who has a wooden leg. Hulga—she was baptized Joy Hopewell but changed her legal name to refl ect her self-fashioned identity—had her leg “literally blasted off” in a hunt-ing accident when she was ten.3 She also has a heart condition that will probably kill her, which adds to her morbid appeal for Mrs. Freeman, who irritates her by using the name Hulga as though she can see some “secret fact” invisible to others. To her mother, though, Hulga is a con-stant trial. Sour and deliberately uglier than she needs to be, Hulga will not let

Glenn C. Arbery

Glenn C. Arbery is the d’Alzon Professor of Lib-eral Education at Assumption College and editor of The Southern Critics (ISI Books, 2010).

Ontological Splendor: Flannery O’Connor in the Protestant South

the intercollegiate review Spring 2011

Glenn C. Arbery Ontological Splendor

42

Mrs. Hopewell keep a Bible in the par-lor because she is an atheist. Even more embarrassing to her mother than her mili-tant lack of faith or her bad attitude is the fact that she has a doctorate in philosophy. As Mrs. Hopewell refl ects, “You could say, ‘My daughter is a nurse,’ or ‘My daughter is a school teacher,’ or even, ‘My daughter is a chemical engineer.’ You could not say, ‘My daughter is a philosopher.’ That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans.”4

Hulga clumps around the house full of contemptuous irony. Out of nowhere, in the middle of a meal, she will get enraged and say things that nobody else under-stands, such as “Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!”5 Once Mrs. Hopewell turned over a book that Hulga had been reading, and found a passage underlined with a blue pencil:

Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing—how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then one thing stands fi rm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the strictly scientifi c approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of Nothing.6

These words—they come from Martin Heidegger’s essay “What Is Metaphysics?” published in a volume that O’Connor owned called Existence and Being—work on Mrs. Hopewell “like some evil incanta-tion in gibberish.”

Hulga, needless to say, does not share the typical Southern “distrust of the abstract.” For precisely that reason, the story comes to focus on a very spe-

cifi c physical thing, her wooden leg. As O’Connor would explain later to a group of writing students, “without ceasing to appeal to [the average reader] and with-out making any statements of high inten-tion, this story does manage to operate at another level of experience, by letting the wooden leg accumulate meaning.”7 How can she approach such matters as philo-sophical nihilism with a detail as stubborn as a wooden leg? Because she is the ben-efi ciary of converging traditions that focus on things themselves as the way into other levels of meaning.

In part, O’Connor’s writing relates directly to Southern biblical concrete-ness, the distrust of the abstract, especially as the Fugitive-Agrarians gave it voice in their poetic theory. In his major essay “Poetry: A Note in Ontology,” John Crowe Ransom objects to the reductive nature of ideas drawn from things as opposed to the things themselves. If one fi nds it pos-sible to “approach the object as such, and in humility,” he writes, “then it unfolds a nature which we are unprepared for if we have put our trust in the simple idea which attempted to represent it.”8 Ransom

O’Connor, Wondering at the Real



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particularly fi nds the approach of science inadequate to the ontology of the image. It can “manage the image, which is infi -nite in properties, only by equating it to the one property with which the science is concerned.”9 Allen Tate takes Ransom’s insight a step further in his thinking about Dante and others in the Middle Ages. Tate quotes a passage from Charles Wil-liams on Dante: “It was, however high the phrases, the common things from which Dante always started. . . . His images were the natural inevitable images—the girl on the street, the people he knew, the lan-guage he learned as a child. In them the great diagrams were perceived; from them the great myths open; by them he under-stands the fi nal end.”10 According to Tate, modern Catholic writers “have lost, along with their heretical friends, the power to start with the ‘common thing’: they have lost the gift for concrete experience.” Instead, they have given themselves over to concepts:

The abstraction of the modern mind has obscured their way into the natural order. Nature offers to the symbolic poet clearly denotable objects in depth and in the round, which yield the analogies to the higher syntheses. The modern poet rejects the higher synthesis, or tosses it in a vacuum of abstraction.11

As Southerners who had converted to Catholicism, Tate and especially his wife, Caroline Gordon, befriended O’Connor, who submitted every story she wrote to Gordon’s exacting criticism before pub-lishing it. O’Connor also took up the challenge that Tate poses here. She staked her career on the possibility that a writer in the Protestant South of the 1950s could do something like what Dante had done in fourteenth-century Italy—not on the

same scale, certainly, but on the same basis. Drawing on Thomas Aquinas and forti-fi ed by the work of Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Josef Pieper, O’Connor added a Thomistic underpinning to her understanding of the poetic image and the particular thing. As Pieper puts it, “The peculiarity of existing is just this, that it—existing, existence—cannot be grasped in a ‘concept.’ ”12 Any abstraction about a tree, in other words, has to leave behind the tree’s actual, particular existence. Trees may do things, such as grow, turn green, and bear fruit, Pieper says, but “in addi-tion [a tree] does something else before all these other individual acts: it exists. This act of existing is not only something ‘of the nature of doing’; it is ‘doing’ in a distinctive and wholly unique sense. The ancients called it ‘doing’ without restric-tion or further specifi cations; they simply termed it actus. The most marvelous of all the things a being can do is: to be.”13

Pieper goes on to argue that “fi rst and foremost the step from nonexistence to actual existence is incomparably more cru-cial than the step from plant to animal or from animal to man. The crucial fac-tor is ‘the actus,’ doing as such, the actual realization of the state of being.”14 But this understanding of existence is rooted in an understanding of God not as unchange-able essence but as the pure Act of Being. To quote Pieper once more, “Wherever we encounter anything real, anything exis-tent in any way whatsoever, we encounter something that has ‘fl amed up’ directly from God. We are dealing with something that is similar to the Existence-in-itself—and not on the basis of an ‘added’ perfec-tion, but on the basis of existence itself.”15 Maritain draws on the same understand-ing when he describes beauty as the “radi-ance of the form” in what exists. In Art and Scholasticism—a book that O’Connor quotes frequently in both her letters and



44

her lectures—Maritain explains that “by ‘radiance of the form’ must be understood an ontological splendor which is in one way or another revealed to our mind, not a con-ceptual clarity.”16

Practically speaking, this means that the real wonder lies at the literal level of the world. Artistically, this ontological splendor emerges not through concepts but through the images that attempt to make acts-of-being present to the mind—in other words, through what is some-times belittled as imitation—and that establish this literal level in a convincing way. In speaking to the writing students, O’Connor says that “medieval commen-tators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level.”17 Notice that she does not say beyond the literal level, but in the literal level—and she goes on to explain the allegorical, moral or tropo-logical, and anagogical levels familiar to students of Dante. “Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis,” she says, “it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature which included most possibilities, and I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fi ction writer has to culti-vate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature.”18

O’Connor fi rst learned from Maritain, who had become a close friend of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon in the 1940s at Princeton—in fact, Maritain was Tate’s sponsor when he came into the Catho-lic Church—the idea of the habit of art, which she explains in these terms: “Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. . . . I think this is more than just a dis-cipline, although it is that; I think it is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them fi nd as much meaning as possible in things.”19

Part of the habit of art, in other words, is reading what literally presents itself to us on more than one level, which constitutes the “enlarged view.” And this refl ection brings us back to Hulga’s artifi cial leg. “If you want to say that the wooden leg is a symbol, you can say that,” O’Connor relates. “But it is a wooden leg fi rst, and as a wooden leg it is absolutely necessary to the story. It has its place on the literal level of the story, but it operates in depth as well as on the surface.”20 O’Connor takes the common thing where she fi nds it and works more and more deeply into that everyday level.

Much of what underlies Hulga’s con-dition remains implicit—for example, the details about how Joy Hopewell lost her leg. It had “been shot off in a hunt-ing accident when Joy was ten,” and Hulga has heard Mrs. Hopewell give Mrs. Free-man the details of the accident—“how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost consciousness.”21 O’Connor does not say how Joy happened to be out hunting. This is surely something that Mrs. Hopewell herself would never do. We would assume that if Hulga went hunting at all, it would have been with her father. But the only detail given about her father comes a paragraph earlier than the fi rst description of how she lost her leg, almost as an aside. Mr. Hopewell is mentioned (though not by name) in one sentence: “Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed someone to walk over the fi elds with her.”22

Unobtrusively, then, O’Connor gives us just enough information to allow a series of inferences. Joy is clearly the only child of this marriage, and if Mr. Hopewell took her hunting, it’s probably because he did not have a son; taking a daughter hunt-ing was an unconventional thing to do in the Georgia of the 1930s, when Hulga would have been ten. What kind of hunt-



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ing was it? The phrase “to walk over the fi elds” subtly suggests bird hunting, as does the name of Hulga’s later seducer, Manley Pointer. If her leg was blasted off by accident, then the shot came from very close range, which suggests that the ten-year-old Joy, nervous and unfamiliar with weapons, tripped with a shotgun. (Mrs. Freeman would know the details.) We aren’t told what happened between Mrs. Hopewell and her husband, except that she divorced him—not the other way around. Why would Mrs. Hopewell divorce him? Because she held him responsible for maiming their daughter. In effect, Hulga’s adulthood stands on this empty space of what is unsaid. Not only does Joy lose her leg, but she also loses her father because of it. She clearly has to fi ll in for him:

Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago, needed some-one to walk over the fi elds with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for these services, her remarks were usu-ally so ugly and her face so long that Mrs. Hopewell would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl, stand-ing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly for-ward, would reply, “If you want me, here I am—LIKE I AM.”23

Walking the fi elds with her mother, in other words, reminds them both that as Joy, she clumsily substituted for the miss-ing son, and as Hulga, she inadequately replaces the missing husband. Despite everything she has done to break free and create herself as a fi gure of powerful will, she also continues to be the child her mother lost: “[Mrs. Hopewell] thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or

had any normal good times.”24 All of this meaning comes to focus on the artifi cial limb, which both stands in for the living leg and signifi es her missing father.

Earlier, I said that this story seems to be the one that most closely refl ects Flan-nery O’Connor’s own circumstances. O’Connor was thirty in 1955 when the story was published, just as Hulga claims to be. In the letters of this period, she speaks about walking with a cane; soon she would be on crutches. Like Hulga, O’Connor “may die,” not from a heart condition but from lupus, and her ill-ness keeps her from being in the center of the literary world, as she was in her early twenties. Mrs. Hopewell refl ects that “Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about.”25 Hulga’s absent father also paral-lels O’Connor’s own. O’Connor’s heredi-tary lupus came from her father, who died of the disease when O’Connor was fi fteen. In her letters to Betty Hester (the woman referred to as “A” in The Habit of Being), she acknowledges Hulga as a version of herself, but not as an index to her own psyche. What interests her is using her own literal circumstances and fi nding in them “a coherent chain of analogies”—in Allen Tate’s phrase—that can lead her to other levels of meaning in her art.

On the whole, O’Connor agrees with Mrs. Hopewell about Hulga: “She was brilliant but she didn’t have a grain of sense.” But to see why, one can’t be satis-fi ed with Mrs. Hopewell’s account of her. For example, when Hulga says “here I am—LIKE I AM,” “here I am” ironically echoes the young Samuel’s response to his call to prophecy; “I AM” is God’s name for Himself as the pure act-of-being in Exodus (as St. Thomas Aquinas interprets



46

it); and “LIKE I AM” recalls the teaching in Genesis that man is made in the like-ness of God. Not that Hulga herself means any of these things. She means that what she is includes both her wooden leg and her bad disposition, take it or leave it. Hul-ga’s response to her life is to cancel out the possibility of any given meaning in it that needs to be interpreted and understood. She sets out to defy her bad fortune and create herself. The fi rst step, needless to say, is rejecting with distaste the idea that there could be anything meant, anything providential, in her heart condition or the loss of her leg. In fact, these impediments, fi ltered through her education in modern philosophy, convince her that there is no given order or meaning in the world. In the Nothing where God used to be, the only truth is that there is no truth, the only meaning that which one makes for oneself.

This self-fashioning can come about only if one boldly confronts the Nothing. For Hulga, the artifi cial leg is in effect the only real part of her, since it is a made thing that she controls in the act of mak-ing herself. Her name also refl ects her self-making: “She considered the name her personal affair. She had arrived at it fi rst purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then the full genius of its fi tness struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act.”26 She understands the name as working in a masculine way, but also having the power to call the goddess. Does she mean Venus, wife of Vulcan? She pretends that the self-created woman can summon a seductive self at will—which brings us to her lamen-table encounter with Manley Pointer.

She has this “tall, gaunt, hatless” boy pegged from the start—the absolutely

typical country Southern Protestant, the embodiment of “good country people,” Bible in hand. Everything in his system of belief, she thinks, centers on the Bible, which is both a text and a kind of talis-manic object to be wielded against the world. He appears guileless and simple, humbly aware of his class differences from the Hopewells, artless in his pro-nouncements—for example, that he lost his father in an accident and that he has a heart condition and “may die.” Best of all, he seems altogether smitten with Hulga. Everything about him is a lie, we later discover, but Hulga suspects nothing. She devises a plan to liberate him into the truth by seducing him. She imagines that he will be remorseful, but she plans to turn his remorse into “a deeper understanding of life,” since “true genius can get an idea across even to an inferior mind.”27 What her deeper understanding is, we discover when Manley and Hulga have climbed to the loft of the barn.

“We won’t need the Bible,” Hulga tells Manley as he heaves his suitcase up the ladder, to which he replies—for reasons that soon become obvious—“You never can tell.” He begins “methodically kissing her face, making little noises like a fi sh.” He mumbles that he loves her, and when she does not respond, he stops and says that she has to say she loves him back:

She was always careful how she committed herself. “In a sense,” she began, “if you use the word loosely, you might say that. But it’s not a word I use. I don’t have illusions. I’m one of those people who see through to nothing.”

The boy was frowning. “You got to say it. I said it and you got to say it,” he said.

The girl looked at him almost tenderly. “You poor baby,” she mur-



47

mured. “It’s just as well you don’t understand,” and she pulled him by the neck, face-down, against her. “We are all damned,” she said, “but some of us have taken off our blind-folds and see that there’s nothing to see. It’s a kind of salvation.”28

Obviously without intending it, Hulga inverts a famous passage in Book 7 of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “When I fi rst knew you, you lifted me up, that I might see that there was something to be seen, though I was not yet fi t to see it . . . and I trembled with love and fear. I realized that I was far away from you in the land of unlike-ness.” Making her own confession, Hulga admits to Manley that she is not seventeen, as she fi rst told him, but thirty, and that moreover she has “a number of degrees.” Manley says he doesn’t care, he just wants to know if she loves him, and when she fi nally says yes, he tells her to prove it. At this point, of course, she thinks that she has summoned Venus and seduced poor Manley without even trying: “ ‘How?’ she asked, feeling that he should be delayed a little. He leaned over and put his lips to her ear. ‘Show me where your wooden leg joins on,’ he whispered.”29

In Aristotelian terms, this is the moment of peripeteia or reversal. Everything she thought was going in one direction sud-denly turns around, and the artifi cial leg, whose existence has led her to remake her-self, once again becomes the central focus:

The obscenity of the suggestion was not what shocked her. As a child she had sometimes been subject to feelings of shame but education had removed the last traces of that as a good surgeon scrapes for cancer; she would no more have felt it over what he was asking than she would have believed in his Bible. But she was as

sensitive about the artifi cial leg as a peacock about his tail. No one ever touched it but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and almost with her own eyes turned away. “No,” she said.

“I known it,” he muttered, sit-ting up. “You’re just playing me for a sucker.”

“Oh no no!” she cried. “It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?”

The boy gave her a long pene-trating look. “Because,” he said, “it’s what makes you different. You ain’t like anybody else.”30

Childlike Hulga fi nds herself deeply moved. She is so innocent that she thinks he’s innocent: “with an instinct that came from beyond wisdom, [he] had touched the truth about her.” She feels that she is surrendering herself to him completely: “It was like losing her own life and fi nding it again, miraculously, in his.”31

What are we to make of this experience that, in another context, would be one of spiritual surrender and conversion? All the deeper meanings coming into play require the revelation of the wooden leg itself as the inmost truth of Hulga’s life: “Very gently he began to roll the slack leg up. The artifi cial limb, in a white sock and brown fl at shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump. The boy’s face and his voice were entirely rev-erent as he uncovered it and said, ‘Now show me how to take it off and on.’ ” As an object by now invested with great sym-bolic potency, the leg has to be ritually unveiled. We have to see it as the most literal of literal things. What makes the story funny as well as a little horrifi c is the fact that, after reverently taking the leg off and reattaching it a couple of times, Man-



48

ley Pointer unceremoniously puts it aside, “setting it on its foot out of her reach.” It stands there by itself without Hulga, an odd, self-standing little idol. “Without the leg,” O’Connor writes, “she felt entirely dependent on him. Her brain seemed to have stopped thinking altogether and to be about some other function that it was not very good at.”32

Manley Pointer opens a suitcase and takes out his Bible, but far from being the sacred object Hulga had taken it to be, the deepest symbol of Southern Protestant belief, it is hollow inside, and he has in it “a pocket fl ask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and a small blue box with printing on it.” The printing says: “THIS PRODUCT TO BE USED ONLY FOR THE PRE-VENTION OF DISEASE.” When she sees that the deck has an obscene picture on the back of each card and that Pointer is offering her a swig of whiskey, there comes the moment of recognition, the Aristotelian anagnorisis: “Her voice when she spoke had an almost pleading sound. ‘Aren’t you,’ she murmured, ‘aren’t you just good country people?’—‘Yeah,’ he said, curling his lip slightly, ‘but it ain’t held me back none. I’m as good as you any day of the week.’ ” Hulga is so outraged that she sarcastically calls him a “fi ne Christian,” to which he replies with a “lofty indignant tone,” “ ‘I hope you don’t think I believe any of that crap!’ ” She last sees her wooden leg slanted forlornly across the inside of his valise, and as he disappears down the lad-der from the loft, he tells her that she “ain’t so smart either. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!”33

She did, by the way, intend to steal his faith and replace it with Nothing. In a way, it’s possible to understand the espe-cially harsh comedy O’Connor seems to reserve for Hulga only because this char-acter most closely resembles herself. I say Hulga, but the character we’re seeing now

is Joy. O’Connor brilliantly returns us to the moment of Joy’s accident at ten. Now, as then, she lies in shock, never los-ing consciousness, missing her leg and needing help. Thrust back into the con-text of her philosophical belief in Noth-ing by the Bible salesman’s parting words, Hulga at last experiences the nothing that Heidegger describes in “What Is Meta-physics?” where he writes, “This ‘being beyond’ what-is we call Transcendence.” It is, as Hulga has told Manley, “a kind of salvation,” but such transcendence Hulga would now happily forgo. Nothing turns out to be nothing but helplessness and humiliation—an agonizing but also somehow cosmically funny crucifi xion of ego. How is she going to explain to stolid Mrs. Freeman how she happened to lose her artifi cial leg (and her glasses, by the way) in the loft of a barn shortly before “that nice dull young man” from the day before disappears across the fi eld with his suitcase?

Allen Tate writes that “to bring together various meanings in a single moment of action is to exercise . . . the symbolic imag-ination.”34 O’Connor exercises it here, cer-tainly. “The symbolic imagination,” Tate says, “conducts an action through analogy, of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity.” O’Connor explains to the writing students, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. . . . The meaning of fi ction is not abstract meaning but expe-rienced meaning, and the purpose of mak-ing statements about the meaning of the story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.”35 O’Connor asks her readers not to hurry through her stories as though they were items in the supermar-ket tabloids Mrs. Freeman probably reads, but to wait patiently for insight, which



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means reading with care and experiencing the accumulated meaning of the details to which she is pointing. In this case it means dwelling on what at fi rst seems to be grotesque—Hulga’s artifi cial leg, which O’Connor explicitly compares both to Hulga’s soul and to a peacock’s tail.

In a piece that she wrote for Holiday magazine, O’Connor describes the undis-tinguished look of the peacock before he spreads his tail: “His end feathers are the color of clay; his legs are long, thin, and iron-colored; his feet are big; and he appears to be wearing . . . short pants. . . . The fact is that with his tail folded, nothing but his bearing saves this bird from being a laughingstock. With his tail spread, he inspires a range of emotions, but I have yet to hear laughter.”36 She goes on to explain that when the peacock fi rst spreads his tail, he turns his back to the person looking at him:

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. And you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing, haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.

“Amen! Amen!” an old Negro woman once cried when this hap-pened, and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inadequacy of human speech.37

Reading one of O’Connor’s stories, we have to wait, in effect, until the pea-cock decides to face us and spread its tail.

What sometimes happens at that point is that the story itself achieves the radiance of form that Maritain describes as onto-logical splendor. Our response may simply be silence, or an hour’s lecture, or a whole book. Or it may be an “Amen!” before a revelation of the real to which any concept would be inadequate.

Flannery O’Connor tried to under-stand the narrow circumstances of her life not as an occasion for bitterness—though she was constantly exorcizing that possibil-ity—but as a gift of meaning that opened onto mystery. As Maritain writes in Art and Scholasticism, “Mystery exists where there is more to be known than is given to our comprehension. To defi ne the beauti-ful by the radiance of the form is in reality to defi ne it by the radiance of a mystery.”38 To me it seems peculiarly fi tting that in a letter she sent on Christmas Eve of 1961, Caroline Gordon—still O’Connor’s friend and mentor—sent Jacques Mari-tain “peacock feathers from Flannery O’Connor’s peacocks.”39 The gesture in itself seems a kind of valediction. Who would have thought that the last great writer of the Southern Renaissance would be a woman dying of lupus who wrote her fi erce—and fi ercely Southern—stories in a milieu almost entirely antithetical to her Catholic vision? To think that feathers from O’Connor’s birds made their way at last to the old philosopher in France, this man who fi rst taught her from afar about the habit of art and the radiance of form, enters a circle of the gift too graceful for commentary.

Notes1 Flannery O’Connor, “Th e Catholic Novelist

in the Protestant South,” in Mystery and Man-ners: Occasional Prose, eds. Robert Fitzgerald and Sally Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), 209.



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2 Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” in Th e Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), 271, 275.

3 Ibid., 275.4 Ibid., 276.5 Ibid.6 Ibid., 277.7 Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,”

in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 988 John Crowe Ransom, “Poetry: A Note on

Ontology,” in Th e World’s Body (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 124.

9 Ibid., 115.10 Allen Tate, “Th e Symbolic Imagination: Th e

Mirrors of Dante,” in Essays of Four Decades (Wilmington: ISI Books, 1999), 429.

11 Ibid., 430.12 Josef Pieper, Guide to Th omas Aquinas, trans.

Richard Winston and Clara Winston (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 134.

13 Ibid., 136.14 Ibid., 140.15 Ibid., 142.16 Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans.

Joseph W. Evans (New York: Charles Scrib-ner’s Sons, 1962), 28.

17 Flannery O’Connor, “Th e Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 72.

18 Ibid., 72–73.19 O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 101.20 Ibid., 99.21 O’Connor, “Good Country People,” 275.

22 Ibid., 274.23 Ibid.24 Ibid.25 Ibid., 276.26 O’Connor, “Good Country People,” 275.

Since Hulga associates her name with the limping blacksmith-god, O’Connor appears to suggest that philosophical nihilism depends on a compensatory technology. But call Vul-can the god of art rather than of technology and the whole temptation of made things as a compensation for absence or loss suddenly comes home as the central temptation of the artist—O’Connor’s temptation. Hulga appar-ently does not feel the same risk, however.

27 Ibid., 284.28 Ibid., 287–88.29 Ibid., 288. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 289. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 289–91.34 Tate, 427.35 O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories,” 96.36 Flannery O’Connor, “Th e King of the Birds,”

in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 8–9.37 Ibid., 9–10.38 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 29. 39 Jacques Maritain, et al., Exiles and Fugitives:

Th e Letters of Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Allen Tate, and Caroline Gordon, ed. John M. Dunaway (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni-versity Press, 1992, 79.

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