How great literature can change your life

Wednesday

In America’s current reckoning with its racist past, authors no less than statues, flags, and military base names are being scrutinized. Recently I’ve come across articles on the prejudice of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, two titanic literary figures.

Paul Elie’s New Yorker article on O’Connor finds ugly observations in recently published correspondence. In May of 1964, not long before her death of lupus at 39, O’Connor wrote to a friend,

About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. M. L. King I dont think is the ages great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually would this person be endurable if white. If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay. “If a tiger move into the room with you,” says Cassius, “and you leave, that dont mean you hate the tiger. Just means you know you and him can’t make out. Too much talk about hate.” Cassius is too good for the Moslems.

While she mentions elsewhere liking a Baldwin story—in my mind Baldwin and O’Connor have written some of America’s greatest short fiction—here she bridles at a black man lecturing her. Better to believe, with Mohammad Ali, that the two races should keep their distance.

They certainly do in her fiction. In stories like “The Artificial Nigger” and “All That Rises Must Converge,” she depicts whites entirely at sea when they encounter African Americans. In the first story, Mr. Head is hysterically frightened by black neighborhoods—he would be a prime audience for Trump’s racist attacks on black urban America—and humiliates himself in front of his grandson Nelson when he accidentally wanders into one. In the second, the protagonist’s mother munificently offers a penny to a small black boy she meets on a bus and then has a heart attack after his offended mother lashes out angrily, telling her, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies.”

Elie points out that the same separation exists in O’Connor’s story “Revelation,” even though some have compared it to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In the story, a white woman suddenly finds her smug self-image shattered by a chance encounter with a college student, and her existential crisis is only overcome by a “revelation” of whites and blacks all trooping off to heaven together. I think Elie is right that we shouldn’t make too much of this togetherness:

Some say this “vision” redeems the author on [race issues]. Brad Gooch, in a 2009 biography, likened it to the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr., spelled out in August, 1963; O’Donnell, drawing on a remark in the letters, depicts it as a “vision O’Connor has been wresting from God every day for much of her life.” Seeing it that way is a stretch. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech envisioned blacks and whites holding hands at the end of time; Turpin’s vision, by contrast, is a segregationist’s vision, in which people process to Heaven by race and class, equal but separate, white landowners such as Turpin preceded (the last shall be first) by “bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”

Mrs. Turbin imagines separate but equal revelation, in other words. By keeping the races apart, O’Connor’s stories play it safe, just as she herself admitted to doing in a 1959 letter:

No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.

In his article, Elie grapples with what we should do with this information. In my own view, great authors tap into their best selves in their art, even if they don’t in their lives. I’m with Shelley in Defence of Poetry when he argues that the best art conveys universal human truths by reaching deeper than the author’s local prejudices. While O’Connor may have been a racist, I think her stories are more complex.

For one thing, they show that black characters deserve respect. Even though O’Connor doesn’t explore the characters in depth, the offended mother in “All That Rises” and the African Americans who congregate around Mr. Head have a dignity that the white characters can’t acknowledge.

Furthermore, she gives us a profound insight into the workings of white racism: how white identify at its very core depends on the oppression of Blacks. In “Artificial Nigger” Mr. Head, panicked because he thinks he has forfeited the respect of his grandson forever, regains solidarity with him at the expense of black America.

Black America in this scene is captured by a deteriorating lawn ornament of a black jockey:

It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro were meant to be young or old; he looked too miserable to be either. He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead.

“An artificial nigger!” Nelson repeated in Mr. Head’s exact tone.

The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets.

Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry need for that assurance. Nelson’s eyes seemed to implore him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence.

Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, “They ain’t got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one.”

Multiple interpretations of the passage exist, including one that the lawn jockey is a Christ symbol, taking on the suffering of humankind to redeem a prideful world. Mr. Head experiences his reconciliation with Nelson as an act of grace. Sometimes American Blacks, when they are not being seen as more bestial than Whites, have been seen as more spiritual. Neither image grants them full humanity.

Whatever the lawn jockey symbolizes, it’s a fact that white unity is achieved by setting itself apart from its blackness.  American racism refuses to go away in large part because it has been written into the DNA of each immigrant group coming to America. Italians, Poles, Irish, Serbs, Swedes and many others started life in this country with one important piece of social capital: they didn’t start at the bottom because there was another group they could look down upon. Although O’Connor’s Irish Catholic ancestors were regarded as little better than scum by many Americans, they could tell themselves that at least they weren’t black.  Noel Ignatiev documents the Irish evolution from oppressed to oppressor in his book How the Irish Became White.

I remember witnessing such prejudice in my mother-in-law, a Scots-Irish descendant who grew up poor in southeast Iowa. Even though she knew no African Americans, she was convinced that they were all shiftless and undeserving. (To her credit, she underwent profound self-examination when my youngest son, whom she adored, married a Trinidadian woman.)  Visceral racism explains why more white men will vote for Trump than for Biden in the 2020 election and why police brutality is never-ending.

O’Connor’s invaluable contribution is to show us the fragility of white racism. The “n—” in her story is artificial, a white construct rather than the real thing, but Mr. Head and Nelson hang on to it for their dear lives. Mr. Head’s learning objective, which he achieves (although not in the way he anticipated), is also the vision of urban America Trump is currently trying to sell to America:

He had been thinking about this trip [to Atlanta] for several months but it was for the most part in moral terms that he conceived it. It was to be a lesson that the boy would never forget. He was to find out from it that he had no cause for pride merely because he had been born in a city. He was to find out that the city is not a great place. Mr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life. He fell asleep thinking how the boy would at last find out that he was not as smart as he thought he was.

 Later we see their battle of wills:

“You may not like it a bit,” Mr. Head continued.  “It’ll be full of niggers.”

The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger.

“All right,” Mr. Head said.  “You ain’t ever seen a nigger.”

“You wasn’t up very early,” Nelson said.

“You ain’t ever seen a nigger,” Mr. Head repeated. “There hasn’t been a nigger in this county since we run that one out twelve years ago and that was before you were born.” He looked at the boy as if he were daring him to say he had ever seen a Negro.

While I appreciate O’Connor for her insights into her own race, I must say that I admire more those authors who are willing and able to venture outside their own milieu and into mindsets alien to them. It’s why I find Toni Morrison a greater author than O’Connor and, for that matter, Tolstoy a greater novelist than my beloved Jane Austen. While it’s admirable to explore what you know—certainly you won’t fail as spectacularly as those who, attempting to understand the Other, emerge only with stereotypes—the artistic vision becomes diminished over time.

I made this argument recently regarding Heart of Darkness, which is superb at capturing white colonialism’s existential crisis but strikes us as smaller than it once did because it fails to grapple with the perspective of the colonized. Once we come to care less about the colonizers, we care less about the work. Will O’Connor’s art begin slipping into the literary canon’s second tier once we begin caring less about racially tormented whites?

I have similar things to say about Faulkner but I’ll reserve that for tomorrow’s post.

Further thought: In her complaint about the pontificating Baldwin, note that O’Connor all but accuses her friend of judging authors through a lens of political correctness (“Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except that you like him but you probably like them all.”). To be sure, O’Connor could be devastatingly perceptive when it came to white liberals, saying of their lionization of To Kill a Mockingbird, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book.” She regarded the fantasy of a white savior as a self-indulgent wish fulfillment (as did Harper Lee in her sequel).

I’m sorry, however, that O’Connor didn’t meet with Baldwin, who shared some of her views about white liberals. He might have expanded her consciousness.