Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress (Brazos Press, 2024) by Jessica Hooten Wilson. Brazos Press, 2024. Paperback. 192 pp. $24.99.
How do the blessed in glory look down upon the fame (or infamy) that surrounds the name they bore on earth and retain in heaven? For the pagan Greeks, kleos (renown or glory)—at best—provided the shades in Hades with some small measure of satisfaction amid their generally dismal state, but Christians,believe that the presence of God in paradise suffices for the soul’s happiness. So perhaps Flannery O’Connor won’t care too much about the fact that this past decade, at least where her legacy is concerned, began in a minor key.
The event that began the fugue was the publication (following the death of George Floyd,) of an inflammatory piece of defamation by Paul Elie, entitled, “How Racist was Flannery O’Connor?” in The New Yorker, ostensibly a review of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s book Radical Ambivalence on O’Connor and race, which led to what more than one author from positions across the political spectrum (including O’Donnell herself) deemed “The Cancelling of Flannery O’Connor.” This cancellation occurred in a high-profile way at Loyola University Maryland, where, despite a petition organized by O’Donnell, and signed by influential churchmen, writers, and scholars, her name was taken off a dormitory for not “reflect[ing] Loyola’s Jesuit values.” One is tempted to note, as did Marc Guerra, citing Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, that such Jesuit values prioritize “kneel[ing] before the world,” elevating the political concerns of the contemporary left above Christian theology. Besides the fact that Elie’s hit piece, as Guerra says, “does not reveal anything substantially new,” his “sensationalist charge of racism, leveled weeks after the killing of George Floyd, is both unfair and untrue.” As James Matthew Wilson put it, Elie “misrepresents O’Connor and attributes racist meanings to passages without evidence or warrant.”
Secular academic publications on O’Connor and race have continued to be published since then. However, many of us in devout Christian environments have turned from fighting what seems an unwinnable war in order to simply focus on O’Connor’s works, investigating how she weighs sinners on what Joshua Hren has called “a more subtle moral scale” than the one typically used in public life today.. The recent publication by Jessica Hooten Wilson of pieces of O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, presents an intriguing avenue into contemporary politics and questions of race, but is not without dangers for the casual reader.
Wilson makes clear in a number of places that her A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress is not a scholarly edition, nor is it perhaps, primarily a work of O’Connor’s. Considering that in a book whose body runs 160 pages, with about 60 pages of material by O’Connor, 89 pages by Wilson, and a three page afterword by the book’s illustrator Steve Prince whose illustrations occupy another eight pages, this seems like a reasonable claim. O’Connor’s writing makes less than a third of the volume overall, including endnotes and introductory material. Wilson claims in her introduction that “To publish her unfinished work as a scholarly artifact would be unfaithful to O’Connor’s intentions for the story.” One can be sympathetic to this argument, knowing O’Connor’s general disdain for the academic elite, so prone to intellectual pride and insipid psychologizing. (Scholars have discussed this attitude of hers recently, although the whole tale of Flannery O’Connor against the academics has not yet been told). But who then is the audience for this work, if not those with a professional interest in O’Connor’s storytelling? A popular audience, one imagines, like that which Wilson served with her remarkable Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Cascade, 2017)—it’s not every dissertation adaptation that wins an award from Christianity Today—but such an audience is sadly poorly served by the diminished and edited scenes as she presents them.
It is true, as Wilson notes, that O’Connor’s 378 pages in the archives of Georgia College & State University (her alma mater, then called Georgia State College for Women) present us with “only a handful of odd scenes.” I spent some time this summer as a Laidlaw Fellow at the GCSU library, primarily examining the manuscript (over 1000 pages long) that O’Connor left of her first novel Wise Blood, which in its published version ran only about 234 pages. O’Connor’s process of composition was materially different than how many of us write today; she would spend three hours every morning pecking away at her typewriter, and would pencil in corrections or changes, and the next day, would often begin the same scene over again, adding the penciled in changes or others she thought of at the time. This leaves us with a profoundly interesting deposit within the manuscripts that shows us something of her process, as well as the moments of distraction and boredom (I imagine) when she chose rather to sketch something in the margins or on a spare piece of paper rather than continuing to write. To this day, there have been no critical editions published of any of O’Connor’s novel manuscripts, such that scholars and teachers of her works as well as writers and artists influenced by them, have no access to or understanding of her creative process, unless they can make a trip down to Milledgeville, some 100 or so miles away from Atlanta.
Readers should, therefore, be cautious, not thinking the O’Connor portions of the book are the undoctored originals, straight from the archives. Wilson admits in her introduction her involvement as editor, writing that her “version of these pages comes from intersplicing sentences and paragraphs from the left-behind pages, making editorial choices about which words O’Connor meant to cut or keep, and presuming to show the best of what was unfinished.” Her scenes, therefore, are composites, and she provides citations in her endnotes of the archival folders from which she drew material. Most of the composites draw from a tremendous number of folders, as out of eleven composites, only six draw from only one folder, and these tend to be the shortest scenes provided. A reader might reasonably expect that these last scenes comprised more or less what was in the archival folder, with O’Connor’s added, handwritten words included, and her crossed out, deleted words omitted; but in at least several cases, Wilson leaves out a line which is preserved in the manuscript, and it’s in no way clear that she did this, or why..
There are arguable changes to the text, and there are those that are hard to argue about because they are not at all transparent to the reader. While noting that O’Connor’s crafting of particular characters depends on the way they speak, particularly whether or not they use the racial slur “nigger” which Wilson insists on only calling “the N-word,” she changes every use of that word in O’Connor’s text to “n—,” or, as she labels it, “the elided version,” citing as an authority, of all people, Oprah. One can, of course, be thoroughly opposed to the use of a racial slur with reference to an interlocutor while thinking that it should be preserved where present in literature for the sake of understanding—thinking with Dumbledore, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, that fear of a word merely adds to the fear of the thing itself. While I think such an editorial change is ill-advised, there is at least something of an argument presented about it, with which one can agree or disagree. Changes which Wilson makes to the episodes “Walter’s Last Will and Testament” and “Walter’s Aunt,” both single-folder episodes, however, exist without acknowledgement and apparent purpose.
In “Walter’s Last Will and Testament,” Wilson both adds her own words to and cuts O’Connor’s from the scene in ways that sanitize the characters, making the mash more bland, as Jerome Foss might put it. In the manuscript, the protagonist Walter wakes up to both see and hear his sister read a will that he was writing out loud, and we get a fragment of it voiced, “my death to humanity” (folder 232a42); this is altered in Wilson’s version to the more anodyne description “She was reading it,” which removes one of the reader’s senses from the scene at hand. We no longer see and hear but simply see, and that from Walter’s perspective. Wilson shifts the perspective of the scene, such that rather being more present in the room ourselves, so to speak, we inhabit Walter’s perspective. At the end of O’Connor’s paragraph describing his sister Mary George, Wilson adds, introducing us to Walter’s thinking, “Nothing would settle her, he thought, but a large, stupid, demanding man” (48).
What Wilson introduces as interior monologue, O’Connor had voiced as dialogue. When his sister asks Walter why he wants to die, O’Connor provides us with a rich description of her protagonist’s nihilistic feelings that Wilson edits out. “‘Because I don’t want to be the male counterpart to you,’ he said with an ugly relish in his words. ‘I resist mediocrity. I don’t capitulate to it.’ She was the kind of woman you liked to hurt if you could once find out how. ‘Nature has done nothing for either of us,’ he said. ‘There’s not one talent to divide between us. We’re natural clods’” (232a42). Right before this passage in the manuscript, when Mary George asks “What’s this dying bit,” Walter responds, “It’s none of your goddamned business” (232a42).
In the short excerpt “Walter’s Aunt,” Wilson edits the introduction so as to diminish the reader’s sense of Walter’s pride upon seeing a priest at a Vedanta lecture in New York. Wilson’s last sentence of the first paragraph reads as follows: “The priest’s expression was of a polite but strictly reserved interest and Walter identified his own feelings immediately, then he let his gaze travel on” (137). O’Connor, however, gives Walter in this scene an anti-clerical sense of superiority: “The priest’s expression was of a polite but strictly reserved interest and Walter identified his own feelings immediately with the taciturn superior expression. Fascinated he watched him until the priest’s eyes shifted and included him in a cold look of clarity. One side of Walter’s mouth slid into his cheek, indicating his superiority to the speaker; then he let his gaze move on” (folder 231b5). It’s again not clear either that Wilson makes this change if all one has is her volume, and it’s unclear why she did, given the superiority of O’Connor’s prose to her adaptation.
One final item deserves note when it comes to Wilson’s critical commentary on the manuscript, namely, her attempt to criticize O’Connor from the flawed “antiracist” analytic of today, rather than allowing O’Connor’s manuscript to creatively ‘read’ our own moment, too full of hubris and a new Manichaeism.
The chapter where she provides this criticism is titled “Epistolary Blackface,” which Wilson provides as a summary judgment upon Walter’s letter-writing to Oona Gibbs, wherein he attempts to impersonate the black farmhand Roosevelt, caricaturing him in the process. Wilson’s claim—that O’Connor could have completed the novel if only she could be empathetic enough with her black characters so as to depict their own consciousnesses from within—rings hollow when remembering this context. If O’Connor had attempted such an endeavor, she would surely be excoriated as writing “blackface narrative.” Perhaps Wilson herself would not take up this critique, but it would be inevitable that an “antiracist” scholar somewhere would. Scholarship predicated on critical race theory relies on a new Manichean division—racist whites vs. victimized “people of color” and allies—that O’Connor, with her trenchant critiques of modern Manicheism, would have seen straight through. One would have hoped that Wilson, a thoughtful reader of the theorist of scapegoating René Girard, would have seen the deformed religion at play within these critical approaches and the cultural hegemony that the American left has been forming for decades. Because she did not, in Glenn Arbery’s words from a review in Dappled Things, “the book feels like less of a service to O’Connor than a glimpse into her limitations and a testament to the royal consciousness of the present moment.”[1]
This is truly unfortunate because while there are many scholars of O’Connor of whom Christians readers should be wary, Wilson has not in general fallen in among their ranks. But this book is not among her best, as hilarious parts of O’Connor’s manuscript are obscured and O’Connor’s reputation is subject to more unjustified criticism. Readers hoping for a glimpse at O’Connor’s novel unfiltered by the spirit of the age will come away from their reading disappointed.
Alex Taylor is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Christendom College. He was previously Cowan Fellow for Criticism at the University of Dallas in Irving, TX, where he is finishing a dissertation that unearths the shared political vision of two 20th century Catholic novelists, Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh. He has published academic literary criticism in journals such as Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, The James Dickey Review, and The Flannery O’Connor Review, and reviews of fiction, nonfiction, and film as well as essays and poetry (translations and original lyrics) in various magazines.
In a review in Dappled Things, Joshua Hren has criticized Wilson’s claim that O’Connor did not finish the novel manuscript because, in her words, “when she writes of Black characters, O’Connor fails to envision their perspective and does not try to enter their minds”; this claim, he argues, “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.” Hren continues to outline problematic consequences to Wilson’s claim for the art of fiction itself, but it’s worth discussing the way in which this claim is part of a double-bind created by leftist critics which allows the writer no way out of being considered a racist. ↑
*Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
