Why Don’t the Christians Rage?
[Editor’s Note: In honor of what would have been Flannery O’Connor’s 99th birthday, please enjoy this review-essay by Joshua Hren on Jessica Hooten Wilson’s recent re-presentation of O’Connor’s final unfinished novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. We also look forward to sharing with you Glenn Arbery’s review-essay on the book in our Easter 2024 edition, due out next month. As the conversation develops within and beyond our pages, we hope you’ll continue to join us for it!—Katy Carl, Editor in Chief, Dappled Things]
Why Do the Heathen Rage?:
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress
January 23, 2024
Brazos Press
“My hand is so black it would burn a hole through your face.” A superfluous man on his parents’ Southern farm, Walter Tilman teases Oona Gibbs, his epistolary lover and a civil rights activist living in New York. From the very first page of Why Do the Heathen Rage?, he takes sick pleasure in pretending to be black. Outside, mowing weeds on a tractor, the black field hand Eustis, “shouted a song to the Lord over the rumble of the machine, flung it out as if the Lord were sitting forward on the throne of heaven with his hand cupped to his ear to catch the words.” As if jealous of Eustis’ sure faith, Walter is inspired to become rival of that same Lord; he tries to assume potencies only God possesses. Whereas later we see Walter “creating his death,” here he first strives to remake his image in that of Roosevelt, the Tilmans’ hired black servant. One of the novel’s main arcs commences: will Walter be able to win Oona’s sympathies, for she herself has boasted a desire to “come down South and live with a Negro family—work, eat, sleep with them, share their burdens for a while,” even—her condescension crescendos—“somehow become them”?; and if she and Walter meet, will they fall into bed, consummating his pastime of “making love through the mail under an assumed name”—or will the heathen’s rage, planted and nurtured in Walter’s home, yield a harvest of hate?
“The only way you will know,” he provokes, “is to come. Get one look. You won’t stay. You don’t know your right hand from your left,” evincing from the beginning his strange relation to the Revelation he supposedly rejects. Is he invoking Christ’s warning in Matthew 6:3—“But when thou dost alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth.”—alluding to Oona’s self-righteous work with the poor? She claims that her commune immanentizes love, though “we can’t use the word ‘love’ because people take it the wrong way,” and “Charity won’t do because it sounds religious, and we aren’t. There’s none of that kind of nonsense about this . . . It’s in you and me! It’s something we got and the prize is right now. The salvation is right now.” Or, is Walter borrowing the prophet Jonah’s mantle, manifesting his wariness over the “heathen” Oona—hoping that after all she won’t “convert”? If so, the allusion to Jonah 4:11 contains its own cautionary ambivalence. God, witnessing Jonah’s hatred of the “New York” of Ninevah, his reluctance to see his enemies saved, asks the troubled prophet: “And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?” Who doesn’t know his right hand from his left? Oona? Walter? Everyone?
Unfortunately, we will never know, for Flannery died before she finished the novel. In Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Jessica Hooten Wilson gives us a curated selection of scenes she sifted from the “378 typed, hand-written pages” that comprised the manuscript O’Connor left at her death, interspersed with commentaries that help us see the sinews between the unfinished opus and everything else Flannery has written.
Some characters undergo metempsychosis, their souls migrating from one story to another while their names and bodies morph. Wilson knows the author’s life and work so well that we can track where everything converges and diverges. For instance, she shows us that after J.F. Powers (playfully?) chastised O’Connor for killing off all of her characters, Flannery took his advice. “I guess I’ll have to resurrect,” she said, and soon set out to continue the story of Asbury, arrogant protagonist of “The Enduring Chill.” When we last saw Asbury the “Holy Ghost, emblazoned in ice instead of fire, continued, implacable, to descend” upon the suicidal, bedbound man. In the sequel, he is Walter, who “wrenched himself away and lurched out of bed. He ran from the room as if from a gathering of devils.” Wilson traces and illumines his and others’ migrations, drawing out these metamorphoses’ implications.
At several crucial forks along the “corrugated clay road” that passes the Tilman’s farm, I confess to hesitating before Wilson’s conclusions and her treatment of O’Connor’s incomplete project. Wilson sees the novel as having been stalled not merely because Flannery was suffering awfully from the “red wolf” of Lupus, but also because “she did not feel capable of entering the minds of her Black characters.” At times Wilson demonstrates judicious care and rare sensitivity in treating Flannery’s relation to race: “how can she be racist and write such anti-racist stories?” Wilson notices important nuances where others have rushed to tear down the stature of the Misfit’s maker. However, her attendant speculation that Why Do the Heathen Rage? was left undone because, “when she writes of Black characters, O’Connor fails to envision their perspective and does not try to enter their minds,” and that therefore Flannery “could not tell this particular story well at that time” seems, well, remarkably speculative, and specious too: that a story which in part revolves around race could only be told well if Black characters are narrated from within is a dubious premise, especially as so much of the partial novel already rests on O’Connor’s comic treatment of Walter’s prejudiced incapacity to enter empathetically into the Other. Flannery clearly intends us to reel over his visibly pathetic efforts at—in Toni Morrison’s way of putting it—Playing in the Dark.
Morrison is persuasive when she says, in an interview on Beloved, that because previous accounts of slavery were simplistic and predictable, Beloved’s moral depth comes, in some measure, through her “focus on the characters and their interior life, it’s like putting the authority back into the hands of the slave rather than the slave owner.” This being said, Beloved’s climactic murder scene—wherein Sethe “[holds] a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other”—is told from several vantages, including that of the former slave owner schoolteacher: “But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew, who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run . . . Suppose you beat the hounds that way. Never again could you trust them,” though it was “all testimony to the results of a little so-called freedom imposed on people who needed every care and guidance in the world to prevent them from the cannibal life they deserve.” Here we see a gifted writer employing an assortment of perspectives in order to condemn one in particular, with all the more power for the indirection. Morrison’s excellence is equally on display when she draws out the vices of characters lesser writers would render as cartoonish victims. But in other instances, without relying on counterpoint narrators, a writer will solicit our sympathy for the illusory self-deceits of a given character’s interiority, by having us pass through the shells of these suppositions in a way that sheds them as lost illusions, removing that character’s authority, disabusing us of trusting the deluded. Exhibit A?: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Finally, please note: Morrison does not say that any work of fiction which lacks the immediacy of characterological interiority is therefore a failure.
As Henry James proclaims in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady:
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find . . . He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine . . . but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has BEEN conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his “moral” reference.
The question is never whether a given aperture is moral or immoral, but whether the writer has made morality artful. Given that all artists lack God’s omniscience, all apertures, all windows are partial—in ways that can be both wonderful and awful—even those that achieve incredible feats. Take the part of Beloved wherein Morrison renders, from within, Beloved’s fraught consciousness: “I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too . . . if we had more to drink we could make tears we cannot make sweat or morning water so the men without skin bring us theirs . . . ” Such intimate passages can make the hard of heart cry. But the limits of Beloved (the character) are revealed only through a more panoramic treatment of the ghost which unveils, from a distance, her demonic demands. Here I believe Wilson would agree: to say that unless a character receives treatment from within, a given novel is a failure, would introduce a number of criteria with potentially disastrous implications for the art of fiction:
It would seem to mean that all works written in first person are lacking simply because their narrators are the sole perspectival centers. In this scenario, skilled authors are unable to create subtle distances between the teller of the tale and what Caroline Gordon calls the “central intelligence” of the novel—not the Literary C.I.A., but rather the total vision, emanating through the related parts of the whole story. That is to say, it would be impossible to achieve irony—saying or showing one thing, but meaning another—from within a first-person point of view; a major means of deepening the moral imagination would be denied not merely to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, but to Twain’s Huck Finn and a whole host of protagonists suddenly confined to a line leading to literary Styx.
It would mean that all characters who lack empathy are bad characters—not bad in the moral sense, but bad in the artistic sense. But, as James Wood demonstrates in How Fiction Works, Ian McEwan’s Atonement is explicitly “about the dangers of failing to put oneself into someone else’s shoes,” but in order to accomplish this end McEwan creates a character named Emily Tallis who is “a very bad imaginative sympathizer, because her anxiety and anger get in the way of her sympathy.” But McEwan, says Wood, is “himself wonderfully good here at ‘being’ Emily Tallis,” at inhabiting “her complicated envy.”
It would mean that the creation of a flat character would be a capital crime. But there is a difference between Walter’s reductive caricatures of Roosevelt and wonderfully actualized “flat” characters. Some characters, just like some persons we know and love when venturing outside of fiction’s little house, are not as “round” as others. Simplicity might, in some writer’s hands, be a recipe for cliché oversimplification. To be sure, the question of simplicity is . . . complex. St. Thomas Aquinas countenances this objection in the Summa: “whatever is best must be attributed to God,” who is “truly and absolutely simple.” However, with us that which is composite is better than that which is simple; thus, chemical compounds are better than simple elements, and animals than the parts that compose them.” His response?: “With us composite things are better than simple things, because the perfections of created goodness cannot be found in one simple thing, but in many things. But the perfection of divine goodness is found in one simple thing.” Still, simplicity, in the sense of that “purity of heart” Christ praises in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:8) or the guilelessness he finds in Nathaniel (John 1:47), is beautiful. Further, and to borrow from Wood again, “if by flatness we mean a character, often but not always a minor one, often but not always comic, who serves to illuminate an essential human truth or characteristic, then many of the most interesting characters are flat.”
It would mean that entrance into a character’s consciousness is not merely one means of making goodly complexity, but the sole way to do so. In his preface to The Princess Casamassima, Henry James reveals that his decision to cast the hypersensitive Hyacinth as protagonist hinges on that character’s capacity “to be finely aware and richly responsible.” James is not wrong to contend that someone like Hyacinth will “enable us, as readers of their record, as participators by a fond attention, also to get most. Their being finely aware—as Hamlet and Lear, say, are finely aware—makes absolutely the intensity of their adventure, gives the maximum of sense to what befalls them.” Surely the same could be said of Marcel, protagonist of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: what a wonder it is to inhabit the rare combination of finely attuned senses and a philosophical cast of mind. But there are other routes to such richness, including the vantage point of third person omniscient that relies little if at all on the at-hand interiority of free indirect style. Wood suggests that it is subtlety that matters—“subtlety of analysis, of inquiry, of concern, of felt pressure—and for subtlety a very small point of entry will do.” In his Preface to The Wings of the Dove, Henry James asserted that even the minor characters “too should have a ‘case.’” But The Portrait of a Lady is not somehow deficient because we see the banal wickedness of Madame Merle from afar, through misdirection and implication rather than from within. Is George Eliot’s Middlemarch weaker for her failure to do justice to the perspective of Casaubon, who, “fixated on his infinite book,” might “surprise us at first” but will, says Wood, “soon stop surprising us, as their central need occupies them. Yet they are no less vivid, interesting, or true as creations, for being flat.” As Wilson at one point grants, “in O’Connor’s fiction, readers see indirectly through the character’s eyes, but they see also with some distance provided by the omniscient narrator.”
It may mean that confinement of minor characters to the margins would be always and everywhere an act of “abuse” against “the proletariat of the novel,” as Alex Woloch argues in The One vs. the Many. In The Fact of the Cage: Reading and Redemption in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Karl A. Plank cites Woloch’s recognition of his own claim’s limitations: “Novelists cannot ‘possibly give equal emphasis to all characters, but narratives certainly do call attention to the problem of ‘stinting’ (to use Chaucer’s term)—constantly suggesting how other possible stories, and other people’s full lives, are intertwined with and obscured by the main focus of attention.” Great writers, Plank counters, can render minor characters told even in passing with an “implied being” that allows the careful reader “to recognize the surplus that hides in a character’s assigned role, to notice without distraction that the barber’s only son has died or that out of a second-floor window an old nurse is calling for help.” In Why Do the Heathen Rage?, O’Connor recurrently calls attention to the Tilmans’ cruelties toward Roosevelt: the way they talk over him and take him for granted; the ways Walter’s own reconstruction of Roosevelt’s character obscures and does violence to his very being: the way in which Roosevelt, in spite of the scarcity of charity given him (Tilman, after his stroke, “made a weak rough motion with his good arm”), is capable of an empathy absent from all the others: “The bloodshot veins in his eyes swelled. Then, all at once, tears glazed them and glistened on his black cheeks like sweat . . . The Negro followed the stretcher to the back bedroom, snuffling as if someone had hit him.” Subtle treatment can come out of even scarce narrative attention.
Questions of complexity and simplicity, of immediacy and irony, psychic identification and ironic distance, empathy and reductive failure are, in the art of fiction, complex.
Wilson’s response to the causality of Walter’s conversion is another point of departure for me, one which grows out of the aforementioned error and also produces some of the more presumptive parts of A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress. O’Connor wrote a dozen-some drafts trying to determine why Walter tries to dissuade Oona from coming to meet him in the flesh. As Wilson expounds, what decides him is a “sudden—but undramatic—conversion to Christianity.”
His conversion comes on a rock where he is reading Oona’s letter. Although the rock itself has evident scriptural resonance (Wilson cites Matthew 16:18), the moment lacks an apparent motive. We do not, in this book, see the full scene, though we learn that it is only “after concluding that Oona has abrogated the place of God,” that he “realizes that he must believe in God.” O’Connor’s posthumous paragraph follows:
He had not up until that moment been a believer. But he realized then, with a shudder, that he was. He was a Christian, bound for hell. His throat had gone instantly dry, his face had grown pale, and it had looked as if the countryside had dropped away from the rock he sat on, and he and the rock were suspended over nothing. Walter knew the Fathers of the Church, he had assisted at Nicaea and at Chalcedon. He had explored the intricacies of Light with Bonaventure; he knew where Aquinas and Duns Scotus would part company. He had seen the path turn downward with Abelard and illogic enter, grandly eloquent, with Luther. He had been active at Trent. He had adhered always to the most orthodox line but never once, never for the slightest moment, had it occurred to him, even remotely, to believe any of it; or that there was the least danger of his doing so. Only now it simply appeared the accomplished truth. Grace originated elsewhere and grace was. It mattered and worse, the woman mattered.
For a man as much in his mind as Walter, it would seem that the remedy for his bad faith would come in the form of intellectual argument. But in the conversion scene above the scholar’s uncommon learning did not save him. Only a fool would say such a course of study could harm the seeker of truth. And yet, as St. Thomas Aquinas demonstrates, if “the knowledge of truth, strictly speaking, is good,” it “may be evil accidentally . . . because one takes pride in knowing the truth.” Knowing, notionally, the truths of the faith but—like a latter-day St. Augustine—lacking the will to love, he remains dead until he reads Oona’s letter. In part he is moved by a fear of eternal separation. Immediately after he becomes a believer he feels—importantly—the effects in his body: his throat goes dry at once, and his face blanches and the rock he sits on feels as if it is suspended over nothing. The language rhymes with God’s creation in Genesis. But as he has not put away the old man, as he holds out from letting the Lord make all things new, Walter experiences the action of grace not as a saving suspension over the void so much as a kind of spiritual vertigo.
In the pages that follow, Wilson takes great care to distinguish her “presumptuous attempt to end the novel” from what Flannery actually wrote. Without question she is correct that “Walter needed a slap in the face to change. He needed to see what he was doing was wrong, that by impersonating a Black person, he was not only lying, he was reducing people like Roosevelt to types, to caricatures.” When Wilson found herself “unsatisfied with Walter’s conversion, even as the starting point of the story, even for a secular contemplative who is intended to hear God’s voice in a whisper,” she was not merely reacting to the absence of familiar shocks found in so much of Flannery’s fiction, because she shows and knows how the author was trying to shift from writing freaks to writing folks, from her telltale shouts to the lower frequencies of truths that can only be told with whispers. “I keep seeing [Elijah] in that cave waiting to hear the voice of the Lord in the thunder and the lightning,” O’Connor confided in 1960, “and only hearing it finally in the gentlest breeze, and I feel I’ll have to be able to do that sooner or later, or anyway keep trying.”
As remedy for dissatisfaction, Wilson inserts a discarded draft scene from The Violent Bear it Away as prospective impetus for Walter’s conversion. The scene itself is fascinating and unsettling. Countenancing “the ugly little cross,” which “looked like some scarecrow dwarf that had been burned to the bone,” John Rayber asks Thomas what a burnt cross means: “It means Jesus Christ was crucified,” he tries, oblivious to its affiliation with the white supremacists’ lynching tree. Wilson posits the cross-burning passage as a “stronger impetus for transformation in Walter. Surely, a burning cross would be enough to scandalize the white intellectual and compel him to see the image of God” even in those he has so reduced. Where she intersperses her own fiction with O’Connor’s excerpts, she has Walter—not Rayber—witness the burning cross and then recognize, in his own hanging mirror, that the face “covered in black earth and distorted by his poor eyesight” resembles the black preacher who, in Wilson’s innovation and addition, had baptized him in his dream the night prior.
The novel certainly incites a fiery yearning for racial reconciliation. But O’Connor’s preparation for and characterization of Walter’s conversion foregrounds other sins as well as other sources of alteration.
In How to Read a Novel, O’Connor’s editor and mentor Caroline Gordon cites Aristotle, contending that all great narrative art falls into two parts: complication and resolution: “the Resolution is always embedded in the Complication from the very start.” Very early on, in the excerpt of Why Do the Heathen Rage? published by Esquire in 1963, Walter’s mother stumbles into one such complication: she discovers, opened on the upstairs bathroom floor, a peculiar volume her son had been reading: “Love should be full of anger,” begins the letter from St. Jerome to Heliodorus, and the intensity does not leave off at the end. The world, Jerome reveals, is a “battlefield,” and “out of the mouth of our King emerges a double-edged sword that cuts down everything in the way.” O’Connor anticipates her readers’ discomfort in the form of Mrs. Tilman’s own: “Then it came to her, with an unpleasant jolt, that the General with the sword in his mouth, marching to do violence, was Jesus.” Of tremendous consequence, as we will soon see, is the content of her condemnation: “Everything his generation took to had to be ugly—ugly pictures, ugly music, and now it occurred to her, an ugly Jesus.” Oona is not the only complication. We can’t help wondering what in the world Walter is doing with this letter of St. Jerome. His mother can only figure that “if you were a scholar you read antiquated things.”
Along with Asbury, Obadiah Elihue Parker migrates into the unfinished novel. Readers of “Parker’s Back” will remember when Obadiah set a tree on fire by driving a tractor. He was daydreaming about the tattoo he would get to win over his iconoclastic wife Sarah Ruth. The “stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” that covers his back does not, it turns out, impress. She accuses Parker of idolatry, sending her husband crying up a tree. As Mr. Gunnels, he, like Eustis, rides the Tilmans’ tractor and, like Parker, he takes pride in his tattoos: Mrs. Tilman begs him to work with a shirt on, but in front of an audience we see “his posture altered as if he were suddenly sitting upon a high-spirited horse.” Amidst the creatures that color his skin is One who was begotten, not made: the Christ of Grünewald’s “Crucifixion.”
When Gunnels finds Walter wandering around the farm taking choreographed photographs to misguide Oona Gibbs into thinking he is Roosevelt, Gunnels asks the underground man to take a picture of the Grünewald on his back, because he can’t see it “straight on”: “It ain’t the Jesus I picked out,” he protests, enunciating the price tag of the misplaced masterpiece. Fueled by his mother’s declaration that the image is “sacrilegious,” Walter once sneaked a glimpse at the Grünewald. “On the way back to the house, he ran the car into a ditch and was badly shaken up.” Beauty will save the world? What is art? What is beauty? By Aristotle’s account in the Poetics, our answer should be as double-edged as Jerome's sword in Jesus’ mouth: “Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.” Ironically, when Walter has his photographs developed, all come out clear “except the one on Gunnels’s back. On that one Walter’s hand had veered. The face was visible but as though through a veil.” Right after this comes the conversion.
Given his reactions to the grotesque crucifixion—the visible wounds the Christ inflicts on him—it is not a far reach to locate this encounter as one major cause of his metanoia. He saw, for a second, the Savior’s uncomely face, the warp of sin, the cost of grace—a counterpoint to the photographic realism which reveals only “through a glass in a dark manner” (1 Corinthians: 13). In The Damned, O’Connor’s fellow Catholic novelist (and one time Satanist) J. K. Huysmans muses on Grünewald’s painting, piercing the reader with its terrible potency: “but to regard this redeemer of the doss-house, this God of the morgue, was an inspirational experience. A gleam of light filtered from the ulcerated head; a superhuman expression illuminated the gangrened flesh and the convulsed features. This crucified corpse was truly that of a God, and, without aureole, without nimbus, with only the blood-sprinkled crown of thorns for accoutrement.” Remember Walter’s mother’s early condemnation: her son’s generation sought an “ugly Jesus.”
A parallel scene occurs when, in The Idiot, Prince Myshkin follows Rogozhin through the darkened rooms of his residence and finds his friend “suddenly halted” in front of Holbein’s “The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb,” another “ugly Jesus” which hangs over the doorway. Whereas all the other paintings are “rubbish . . . this one, over the door wasn’t rubbish,” he remarks, initially setting apart this particular image by means of its monetary cost—the way Gunnels set apart his botched tattoo. In life, and in death, Christ has been gambled over, but Rogozhin refuses to sell. Pointedly—again “suddenly”—he asks Myshkin “do you believe in God or not?” The Prince does not answer. He calls the question odd and remarks instead on his friend’s disfigured face, even as Rogozhin admits that he loves looking at the Holbein painting. “That picture! A man could lose his faith looking at that picture!” the Prince proclaims, leaving his hedging and hesitation to die.
O’Connor “intended to spend the summer of 1963 rereading Dostoevsky, so it is likely that his ideas influence episodes in the manuscript,” as Wilson notes in one of her elucidating asides. William A. Sessions first alerted her to the unfinished manuscript by characterizing the final novel as Flannery’s “most Dostoevskian story.” Dostoevsky is elsewhere in the curated pages, not least in a derivative scene wherein Walter justifies his plans for suicide in terms straight out of the mouth of Kirilov, the revolutionary from Dostoevsky’s Demons who could have underwritten his counterpart’s claim that eventually people will die “just by deciding they’ve had enough. That’s why I’m leaving my death to humanity, so they can learn.”
But the echo of The Idiot is exemplary artistry, for though O’Connor preserves the power and even the tenor of Dostoevsky’s “ugly Jesus,” she makes the old new, using the Grünewald Christ to heal Walter Tilman’s Gnostic spirit—his Manichean hatred of the flesh. (Oona doubles his discomfort at a young age when her activist mother is warped by sickness to look like Holbein’s Christ: “she was thin and drawn. Her eyes burned a black blue in her white face.” Countenancing this horror, the young Oona decides that “her real mother was already dead. The distraught woman who screamed at her was not real. It came to her only slowly that she should kill this woman and herself.” Walter’s aforementioned plans for suicide are disrupted when his estranged and sickly father brings him chocolate pie and cigarettes in bed, stirring “a return of the wild ridiculous affection for his father that he had had only when he was six.” Similarly, if from a different angle, Oona’s suicidal and homicidal frenzy gives way to a childlike disposition when her mother confesses that “I’ve always talked to you as if you were an adult. Now, I’m going to begin again.”
The episode with his father reveals the way in which the bonds of flesh disrupt the son’s most extreme efforts at escapism. Take this prophecy of social media: “Whenever one of his correspondents, from being a caricature, turned into a human being, pathetic, undemanding, full of ridiculous encroaching love, Walter wrote DECEASED across the letter he had just received.” His de facto philosophy keeps things . . . spiritual: “He had more friends he had never seen than friends he had met. The soul moves quickly without the body. Flesh is the greatest interference in love.” Walter is so cranial, so bent on disembodying himself, that O’Connor takes pains to remind us of his body. “Big fat lump of learning.” “Like an absorbent lump, she thought.” Such lines are common on his family’s lips, even when they bite their tongues. When Oona scrutinizes the photo Walter sends her, she notices his “noncommittal superior half-smile” along with his “large and slovenly” indifference.
The flesh of others is as frightening to him as his own skin is foreign. Part of what gets in the way of Walter’s salvation is, without question, racial prejudice. When his mother worries aloud that Oona may not be white, Walter replies, “She couldn’t be black.” His remonstration rouses a sounding of fears: “But he saw that she could be huge and vulgar and emaciated and loud and brash.” As a “parade of horrors passed before him,” he “conceived of her as simple flesh” for the very first time, and he “sickened.” Incarnation is his enemy.
He returns to his room but the seal of solipsism seems to be rent: “His horror with himself was a dark as his fear that Oona Gibbs would come.” His erratic feelings toward the woman and “his idiot behavior all spring—all of it had to do with the ugly fact of his discovered belief, of his revolting conversion which he had neither been able to throw off nor warm up.” Like the lukewarm, whom Christ spits out in Revelation (3:16), Walter lacks the living flame of love. Given the gift of faith but refusing to pay others the “debt of love” (Romans 13:8), he is living the death that is faith without love. The “ugly Jesus” apparently quickened “the ugly fact of his discovered belief,” but because his “out of kilter” will grates against the incarnation, “his vision was as clear as Satan’s,” and we know just how ruthlessly clear yet deceptively distorting that vision is.
It is no accident that Walter immediately invents a sickness that will keep Oona safely away. Hepatitis? Spinal meningitis? The latter would embody the swell of his pride. His faux disease of the flesh externalizes his fearful spiritual condition.
The fleshy Grünewald leaves Walter wanting to see more. “To experience the beautiful is not only to be satisfied,” John Milbank argues, “but also to be frustrated satisfyingly; a desire to see more of what arrives . . . is always involved.” We can say the same of the truths that satiate even when told through ugly images which we view with pain. In Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Flannery, no mean artist, was surely mapping a confluence of causes for Walter’s conversion: Jerome and Bonaventure and Aquinas for the spirit and the Grünewald tattoo for the flesh; Walter’s father, and maybe his sister?; perhaps Oona herself, eventually, as a reconciliatory force between the two, though a marriage plot would have presented a divergence from O’Connor’s prior oeuvre.
What would it mean to redeem the flesh for this specific soul, Walter? “Black and white is just a detail, like fat and thin, as far as I’m concerned,” Oona counters in one of her letters. Aquinas, who wrote an approving commentary on the Categories of Aristotle, would concur with her—and his mentor: “But substance being one, and the same in number,” can pass through accidental changes, so that “‘a certain man’ being one and the same, is at one time, white, and at another, black, and warm and cold, and bad and good.” Sin enters when people treat accidents as substances, when skin color is considered constitutive of an entire identity. Walter’s racism is articulated when, reading Oona’s letter, he mutters aloud that color, far from being “just a detail,” is a “rather significant detail.” Paranoid, he receives her use of the word “‘black’ as if she were throwing it in his face.” He is especially piqued because her indication that his blackness does not bother her reminds him how bad he is at pretending that he is Roosevelt. “As far as Negroes went,” he admits, “his fictional sense was inadequate. He could only look at them from the outside.” As if to counter Oona’s “color blindness,” Walter essentializes the Other’s blackness and thereby ensures continuance of his own damning fictions. Oona and Walter become comic doubles, though at opposing ends of a spectrum, fulfilling Flannery’s feeling: “I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue, the whole racial picture” of civil rights advances which “affects my writing by keeping me at it. It’s great fuel for my kind of comedy and my kind of tragedy.”
At the same time, her prophetic vision, fixed on humankind’s perennial Fallen state, permitted her to see that “The fiction writer is interested in individuals, not races; he knows that good and evil are not apportioned along racial lines and when he deals with topic matters, if he is any good, he sees the long run through the short run.” In O’Connor’s hands, though, racism is not the only sin, nor is it separable from the widespread Manichean inclinations of modernity (“The [Manicheans] sought pure spirit,” she observed, “and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. This is also pretty much the modern spirit.”) As Wilson remarks, Walter copies his twenty-eight year old character-counterpart Mr. Shiftlet from “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” who declares that “A man is divided into two parts, body and spirit . . . The body, lady, is like a house: it don’t go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always on the move, always.” In his disincarnate dreams, Wilson says, Walter denies that “the soul affects the body, and vice versa.” The segregation of flesh and spirit occasions a whole host of iniquities, exacerbating rationalizations for gluttony and sloth and pride and lust, and giving young Oona’s grounds for euthanasia and suicide.
Conversion, then, is larger than the purgation of racism, but in Flannery’s artful rendering prejudice is a product of that puerile but deadly pride which busies itself with “arranging reality for other people.” Her novel alternately assumes a comic garb that provokes in the reader an angry heart hungry for real reconciliation and a tragic costume that solicits solemn self-recognition. As Wilson aptly acknowledges, “If every era suffers from cultural blindness, we cannot assume we are without deficiencies as well.” An artist could “get racism right” in his rendering of a narrative arc while simultaneously occluding, from the registers of his novel, a more subtle moral scale capable of measuring a whole hierarchy of other perennial goods, all of which can be denied in—please bear with the archaic but wonderfully precise vocabulary— mortal and venial ways.
We cannot make the marquee sins in vogue at the moment the only flaws of her characters—or ours. The startling passage from St. Jerome delivers a vision of Christ completely foreign to a modernity whose signature key Kierkegaard describes well as soothing “chatter about a heavenly friend . . . and other such saccharine stuff.” Contrast this with the words of the open book found lying on Walter’s bathroom floor. “Love should be full of anger.” The protagonist’s “revolting conversion” is only partial—to faith but not to love. Faith, for the saved, like prophecies and tongues, shall cease when our flesh finally rests. But as O’Connor reveals by via negativa in Why Do the Heathen Rage?, modern love—or should I say Manichean love?—knows no righteous anger: it knows only hollow rage. Charity in the Christian sense is the only real measure by which a man can say he believes.
The passions are no more purely evil than the body. Perhaps Walter’s autodidactic course through the Summa, like Flannery’s twenty minutes of St. Thomas before bed, would have glossed the passage wherein Aquinas, “treating of the passions,” explains that, “the difficult good has something attractive to the appetite, namely the aspect of the good, and likewise something repulsive to the appetite, namely the difficulty of obtaining it.” For anyone seeking a difficult good, “there is a need of moderating and restraining moral virtue, while for those which are a kind of recoil, there is need, on the part of the appetite, of a moral virtue to strengthen and urge it on.” Similarly in Dante’s Purgatory the souls being purified are goaded by the “whip” of an exemplary virtue even as they are restrained by a cautionary vice. So in O’Connor we have a Jesus possessed of both scandalous ugliness and saving beauty, a summons to a charity that is inseparable from righteous anger: this Christ with a chest is so very different from either the therapeutic self-care of Eat, Pray, Love (“Somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace,” Wilson cites) or the romantic lies of deceitful desires.
Only lovers who know the meaning of Christ’s righteous anger—over injustice against God and our neighbors—can fully, touching his wounded body, say the first words of the Creed: “I believe.” Jesus, with his double-edged sword, comes to cut down everything in the way—everything that diverges from the Risen One who loved his wounds so much He kept them when he went away: “For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh” (Ephesians 2:14).
What would this double-edged sword have looked like in Flannery’s final fictional form? What would that love have looked like—a love that knows anger but is nonetheless love? O'Connor was that rare writer who is both skillful and soulful. She had the sanctity and artistic chops to achieve such an end. I cannot conclude that her inability to complete the task was tragic in character, because her final end took her before she could finish, and the end of that story is far greater than any mere human creation. Nonetheless, and though I have never yet met her, these shared scenes from her last novel make me miss her terribly. Even these partial scenes stir the desire to take a train through Taulkingham down to Georgia, and to sit a while with the whole 378 pages, hoping for a direct transfusion of Flannery’s wise blood.
1. The word “modern” is used here as a stand-in for a philosophical (or anti-philosophical?) disposition whose line of argumentation would take us far away from the corrugated clay road that runs past the Tilmans’ farm. Weldon Thornton articulates the beginning of the problem in The Antimodernism of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The term [modern] has an inherently temporal implication (with a modicum of perennial meaning), but we would endow it with substantial, a-temporal meanings . . . ”