sapientia
Diane and I are avid readers of World magazine, a weekly Christian news magazine with top-notch reporting, columnists and commentary. Their annual “books issue” came out a little less than a month ago. In it, along with the book reviews, was a faux interview with Christian novelist Flannery O’Connor pieced together from passages from her 1969 book Mystery and Manners. It is presented as a response to a reader’s request for advice concerning fiction writing as a believer. The mindset conveyed by O’Connor is strikingly Schaefferian and a fantastic reply to those wondering about the attitudes we, as believers, ought to take towards the arts in general. Some excerpts:
WORLD: Why do you call lots of religious novels “sorry”?
O’CONNOR: The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns … by beginning with Christian principles and finding the life that will illustrate them … The result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.
WORLD: Some Christians object to showing evil and violence on the grounds that the good must be emphasized because the good is the ultimate reality?
O’CONNOR: The ultimate reality has been weakened in human beings as a result of the Fall, and it is this weakened life that we see.
WORLD: Some of our readers who don’t like writing about adultery or murder quote the admonition in Philippians 4 to think about what is good. Should novelists avert their eyes from what is bad?
O’CONNOR: The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. . . . What he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be . . . to ‘tidy up reality’?
WORLD: I think I know how you answer those questions . . .
O’CONNOR: [The Christian fiction writer] is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to ‘tidy up reality’ is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride.
WORLD: Is tidied-up writing also weak writing?
O’CONNOR: The fiction writer has to make a whole world believable by making every part and aspect of it believable. [He has to be concerned] with the evil, and not only with the evil, but also with that aspect which appears neither good nor evil, which is not yet Christianized.
WORLD: But there are dangers in this.
O’CONNOR: It is very possible that what is vision and truth to the writer is temptation and sin to the reader. There is every danger that in writing what he sees, the novelist will be corrupting some ‘little one,’ and better a millstone were tied around his neck. . . . This is no superficial problem, [but] to force this kind of total responsibility on the novelist is to burden him with the business that belongs only to God.
WORLD: So what do good writers do when they see the need to describe but want to minimize the anger of corruption?
O’CONNOR: [The good writer should] take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to the central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses.
WORLD: Should readers have obligations as well?
O’CONNOR: [Some readers] open a novel and, discovering the presence of an arm or a leg, piously close the book. We are always demanding that the writer be less explicit in regard to natural matters or the concrete particulars of sin. [Such readers] are over-conscious of what they consider to be obscenity in modern fiction for the very simple reason that in reading a book, they have nothing else to look for. They are totally unconscious of the design, the tone, the intention, the meaning, or even the truth of what they have in hand. They don’t see the book in a perspective that would reduce every part of it to its proper place in the whole.
It’s an answer to my frequent railings against the Christian music industry and my concern with our response to cultural tides in general.
I scanned the “new releases” on the iTunes store last night, didn’t recognize a single one (I haven’t listened to mainstream radio in months) and decided I am okay with that. Maybe this is where my music taste freezes. But more likely is that it will continue, just self-propelled (as it always has been, really), rather than depending on the radio to suggest what I should like. It does mean, however, that I will become something less than a pop culture expert. This is an easy sacrifice. As I told Diane yesterday during a similar conversation, the past 40-odd years have left us such a dense collection of music that I think we could mine it at the rate we do for the rest of our lives and be quite content.