The Amphibium, pt. 6
This is Vol. 6 of the Amphibium.
Everything That Rises
We went down to Savannah for a wedding over Easter weekend, and while we were there I visited the house where Flannery O’Connor spent her first twelve years, before moving to Andalusia, the family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lived most of the rest of her short life.
I understand that there is a proper O’Connor museum now at Andalusia, which is the place most identified with O’Connor, the place where she raised her famous peacocks. The house in Savannah is more modest; it’s been restored to its 1930s state, and it gives you a good sense of what life was like for a young white girl of roughly O’Connor’s social class in Depression-era Savannah, but it has little in it that is particular to the writer she would become. (The restoration was paid for in part by Jerry Bruckheimer, who is apparently a big O’Connor fan. There’s something to be said about that, but I don’t know what.)
Savannah is a lovely old city dominated by two dozen small parks or green squares, which you come upon every few blocks as you wander around downtown. O’Connor’s childhood home was located--by coincidence, it seems--on the same square as both her Catholic girls’ school and the local Catholic Church, the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, where we went for Easter mass. On my tour, I learned that the parish's boys' and girls' schools were on opposite sides of the square, and that the children would play in the space between them during recess and after class. In those days, there was a trolley track bisecting the square; one side was considered the girls’ side, the other the boys’ side.
Walking around the square, I was struck by how circumscribed the life of O’Connor’s girlhood was. Each day, she left the house and went less than a city block to school. After school, she played in the square adjacent to both school and home. On Sundays, to church, also on the square. (Only after I got home did it occur to me that my own Catholic boys’ school was two blocks from my childhood home, with the church we went to every Sunday right across the street.)
She was still in her twenties, at the beginning of a writing career of unlimited promise, when she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father when she was a child. She’d spent the first years of her adulthood living a more or less typical young literary life of the time—graduate school at the Iowa Workshop; trips to Yaddo, where she made friends with Robert Lowell; stays at Robert and Sally Fitzgerald’s Connecticut home. After her diagnosis, she retreated to Andalusia Farm, where she lived another twelve years, dying at age 39. Under these conditions, she wrote her finest work, the work for which she is most remembered now. And I wondered whether her early experience on that square had been a kind of training in the freedom one can find within such restricted circumstances.
Getting the horns into the ribs
Another thing O’Connor did during her years in Andalusia was write letters, many of which are collected in a volume, The Habit of Being, which is one of her great books. I’ve been flipping through it since we got back. The other day, I came across the following passage, written in response to a question about the symbolic meaning of her story “Greenleaf,” which memorably ends with a woman being gored by a bull. Here is O’Connor’s response:
My preoccupations are technical. My preoccupation is how I am going to get this bull’s horns into this woman’s ribs. Of course why his horns belong in her ribs is something more fundamental but I can’t say I give it much thought.
O’Connor is expressing a very common idea: while critics or academics or even common readers may concern themselves with things like theme and symbolism, the writer at work is mostly concerned with a series of practical challenges to be met by way of craft.
In my experience, there is a lot of truth to this as a description of the writing process, and I have passed this information on to students and aspiring writers many times myself. But reading these words in our current climate, I was struck for the first time by the obvious parallel between this view of writing and the broader technocratic view of politics, society, or human relations as a series of practical challenges to be answered by the application of technical expertise.
Technocrats get a bad rap sometimes. I think we can all agree that there are many human problems that are indeed best met through technical expertise. Technique is a great thing to have at one’s disposal, once you have decided to put the bull’s horns in the woman’s ribs.
At the same time, there are certain fundamental questions, “why his horns belong in her ribs” questions, that technocrats can’t answer. Most healthy societies have, if only by implication, a shared set of answers to these questions, and even when they don't, circumstances may allow them to leave these questions unasked for long stretches.
But when these questions are up for debate, the technocrats seem especially useless, and we wind up with a crisis of confidence, one in which people start to treat expertise as an actual liability, start to hand the job of fixing our problems over to people who flaunt the fact that they don't have any relevant experience, that they don't really know what they're talking about. People who tell us that the experts are actually the problem.
I want to bring this back to literature, because we live in an era of institutionalized Creative Writing, in which the overall technical mastery of the craft of fiction writing is probably as widespread as it has ever been, and this also happens to be a time of great crisis of confidence among fiction writers.
I could give you many examples of this, but for now I will just offer three quotes, from three writers I happen to admire a great deal:
Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read it and thought: this is something someone else has made up. –Karl Ove Knausgaard
Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous. –Rachel Cusk
I sat down to think about writing a new book and just didn’t see the point of it. What’s a novel? You make up a story and then you tell that story. I didn’t understand why or how that would be meaningful. –David Szalay
I have a lot more to say about this, and I will attempt to do so in the next few installments of this newsletter. But this is already getting long, so here I just want to articulate the problem. What seems clear is that no amount of technical proficiency in the craft of "making things up" is going to resolve these doubts. What is needed is something much more fundamental.
It is tempting to say, as many will, that in our particular moment there are simply more urgent questions at hand, and this is the reason that fiction writers--like all sorts of other people--are wondering what point there is to the work they do. But then there is O'Connor, sentenced to death by a doctor, facing the most urgent problems it is given to human beings to face--intense suffering and impending mortality--and responding by sitting at her desk, trying to get the horns into the ribs.
"Greenleaf" was collected in Everything That Rises Must Converge, one of the 20th century's great story collections, which O'Connor wrote over that last decade at Andalusia. Under unbearable physical duress, she completed the book. It was published a few months after her death.