contact with mystery

This past week I've been reading some Flannery O'Connor. I'd forgotten how dynamite she is. She's a straight-forward, Southern wit. She's droll and spot on. She conveys the human condition without a drop of sentimentality. Her writing is pithy and weighty. I think of O'Connor and some of her contemporaries when I consider CSL's quotation: "There's no such thing as Christian art only Christian artists." She confronts evil and mystery head on. She doesn't make excuses for her characters, but she offers a larger frame than visual reality. Unlike Flannery O'Connor and the Bible, crappy Christian fiction moralizes. The Bible is full of nuance and ambiguity*, and so is a Christian's fiction. For instance, Judges-- these are the good guys? When writing turns didactic, it ceases to be art.

Here are two tastes of her ideas and style from an essay/lecture, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction", in Mystery and Manners, Occasional Prose.

"The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. Fiction should be both canny and uncanny...." (79)

"A gift of any kind is a considerable responsibility. It is a mystery in itself, something gratuitous and undeserved, something whose real uses will be hidden from us. Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain ascetiscism and a very definite leaving behind of the niggardly part of the ego. The writer has to judge himself with a stranger's eye and a stranger's severity. The prophet in him has to see the freak. No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.
"I think it usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth." (81-2)


* This is not to say that Scripture lacks authority in a Christian's life or that we're left without any hints to how to love God and each other. I would like to follow Mark Twain's lead in this: I don't have a problem with the parts of the Bible I don't understand; my problem's with the parts that I do. It was last week I was thinking about how the two most detested sins throughout Scripture are idolatry and injustice, which happen to be the inverse of loving God and loving neighbor. Fathom that. Even more depressing, it took me so long to make the connection.