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Flannery O’Connor and the
Christ-Haunted South
by Ralph C. Wood
Eerdmans, 2004
Reviewed by John Tintera
If someone unfamiliar with the art of Flannery O’Connor were to pick up this new book from Ralph C. Wood, he or she would probably come away thinking that O’Connor was a conservative orthodox Christian writer in the last stages before canonization. While to a certain extent that’s true (well, at least the conservative orthodox Christian part), there’s also a darkly subversive, if not outright nihilistic side to O’Connor’s writing. Wood either missed this aspect of O’Connor’s art, or chose to overlook it, in his effort to claim O’Connor as a patron saint of the religious right.
For O’Connor’s many fans, Wood has much to offer. For one, as a conservative Southern Protestant, Wood is intimately familiar with the milieu in which O’Connor lived most of her life and ultimately captured in her fiction. What’s more, he is an intellectual and scholar in the finest sense. Indeed, the extent to which Wood has gone to uncover the wellsprings of O’Connor’s spirituality is very impressive and would have been inconceivable in the hands of a secularist critic. Even more extraordinary is his knowledge of and sensitivity toward O’Connor’s Catholic faith. I daresay he surpasses the average Catholic in this. In addition, Wood seemingly has at his fingertips whole libraries of detail from twentieth century theology, cultural criticism, and literature.
In some respects, the quotes, references to works outside the O’Connor canon, and footnotes are the best part of the book. That’s not to denigrate Wood’s own prose (though it can be a bit turgid at times), but to give recognition to his uncanny ability to showcase the brilliance of O’Connor with a great quote. For example, in discussing the anti-bourgeois attitude of her first novel, Wise Blood, Wood places a footnote to O’Connor’s contemporary and fellow Catholic, Walker Percy, which highlights both writers’ conviction that the automobile is “the great American Dream Machine.” I had not noticed it previously, but after going back through O’Connor’s stories, I was newly tuned into the fact that cars play a pivotal role in many of them. Indeed, automobiles often loom very large in the imaginations (and downfalls) of her protagonists.
For the reader not totally in step with Wood’s politically-oriented Christian conservatism, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South offers many such epiphanies, but ultimately disappoints. One letdown is the fact that Wood only eludes to a handful of the stories. In fact, he gives as much attention to O’Connor’s letters and speeches as to her fiction. This actually is in line with the polemical nature of the book -- more than anything Wood is making an argument for a greater role for Christianity in society and lamenting its gradual disappearance from the public square. While there’s no doubt that O’Connor would have been sympathetic to this cause and clearly stated so in her letters and speeches, there’s more to her tales than just that. For example, I would have loved for a critic of Wood’s talents to provide the same kind of cultural and literary background to a story like “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” as he does with Wise Blood. “A Late Encounter” is lacking in messianic imagery and one is hard-pressed to read this darkly comic story about a small-time exploitation of Civil War grandiosity as Christian allegory. And as much as Wood would like us to see O’Connor as the enemy of nihilism, it’s hard not to feel the cold winds of hell in many of her stories.
The fact is that Flannery O’Connor’s art is real art. It’s not a kind of propaganda for a political or religious cause. While Wood’s book is helpful in elucidating O’Connor’s Christian imagination, which largely, but not entirely informed her art, a book of this scope is just the first step. O’Connor’s fiction is certainly Christ-haunted, but it’s Satan-haunted too.
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