Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South [Hardcover]

Ralph C. Wood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2004

This is an excellent and lucid study of OConnors theological and cultural convictions, with a study of the grotesque in her work as well as an elegant exploration of OConnor as an engimatic Southern writer.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Wood, one of our most astute critics of Christianity and literature, offers a splendid study of O'Connor, one of our most enigmatic Southern writers. Raised in Savannah and Milledgeville, Ga., O'Connor found herself a Catholic in a deeply Protestant South. But as Wood demonstrates, she was at home there, as she used her stories and novels to challenge what she saw as the sentimental piety of her own faith and the dullness of the Protestant liberalism of her time. Drawing on O'Connor's fiction, letters, book reviews and occasional writings, Wood examines key topics from race and the burden of Southern history to preaching and vocation. Although the depth of O'Connor's religious devotion reflected the sacramentalism of her Catholic faith, Wood ingeniously points out the debt she owed to the Bible-centered vision of Protestant theologian Karl Barth and to the images of fallenness that Reinhold Niebuhr offered in his famous work The Nature and Destiny of Man. Rather than reading thematically through O'Connor's entire oeuvre, Wood selects stories and episodes from novels that illustrate his thesis about O'Connor's concerns. Wood observes that most of O'Connor's stories end with a graceful scene in which her protagonists experience a revelatory moment, "at once disclosing the horror of sin but also overcoming the horror with hope." Although there is no end to the books on O'Connor, Wood's elegant exploration of her theological reading of Southern culture provides fresh insight into her relevance for us today.
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Review

"Anyone pursuing study of O’Connor’s work will enjoy this book. Recommended." -- Choice

"Powerful. . . . Wood has successfully refreshed O’Connor’s message for a new generation of scholarship." -- Times Literary Supplement

"The result of a lifetime of thought and careful scholarship. . . . Wood is an ideal guide to O’Connor’s work and thought." -- The Christian Century

"This book is an intelligent companion to some great writing." -- National Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company; First edition (April 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802821170
• ISBN-13: 978-0802821171
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,128,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Poignant Critical Essays, April 19, 2005

By 

Brent Wittmeier "bwittmeier" (Alberta, Canada) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Hardcover)

Ralph Wood's Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South is a wonderful companion volume to the writings of a great southern writer.

O'Connor's fiction is best known for her short stories, chock full of southern prophets, racists, and embittered family relationships. This often offensive culture receives extraordinarily sympathetic and subtle treatment at her hands. In O'Connor's fiction, therefore, the 'backwoods' forms a biblical landscape in which the themes of salvation, sin and perdition. Fundamentalists, as in no other location, are treated with deserved respect and honor.

Ralph Woods might well be a figure in an O'Connor story. A Baptist southerner who received a divine call of his own, Woods encountered Catholic intellectuals during his years in college. Drawn by the orthodoxy of Catholic faith, as well as compelling writers such as O'Connor, Walker Percy, and J.R.R. Tolkien, Wood has become a unique creature: a Catholic Baptist Southern Literary Critic.

Wood's unique perspective enables him to uncover vistas in O'Connor's work which may be missed by other critics. Where else in the O'Connor critical literature might we see extensive quotations from Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Paul II? Wood argues compellingly for the cogency of O'Connor's Christ-haunted south, which despite obvious flaws, provides a challenge to northern superiority.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sensitive Cultural and Theological Analysis, May 28, 2006

By 

Daniel C. Harlow (Grand Rapids, MI USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Hardcover)

Wood's study is a sensitive treatment that brings Southern culture and O'Connor's fiction into a reciprocally illuminating focus. Six of the book's eight chapters appear here as much-revised versions of previously published essays. Even so, the book hangs together effectively as a monograph. Its signal contribution to studies of O'Connor's work comes especially in its theological analysis, which relates her thought not only to the Catholic tradition but to twentieth-century Protestant theologians like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Wood begins in chapter 1 by detailing how O'Connor's orthodox, sacramental and deeply iconic Catholicism gave her an appreciation for the Bible-centered Protestant fundamentalism typical of her native region. While revisiting "The Violent Bear It Away," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and "Parker's Back," he shows how the fanaticism of the backwoods country preachers and misfits in her fiction opens them to transcendent realities to which the nihilism and lukewarm liberalism of modernity remain oblivious.

He proceeds in chapter 2 to describe how the great "burden of Southern history"--the South's loss in the Civil War--imbued Southern culture and its literature with a sense of human finitude at once tragic and true. Wood brings O'Connor's unique perspective into conversation with H. L. Mencken's notorious disdain for the South, which he derisively labeled "the Sahara of the Bozart"; with the Agrarian author and former disciple of Mencken, Allen Tate, whose defense of antebellum Southern culture obliged him to jettison the specific truths of Christianity; and with Eugene Genovese, the former Marxist cum rehabilitated Catholic, whose analysis of antebellum slavery provides a corrective to Tate. Wood also makes brief forays into the Scopes trial, snakehandling, and O'Connor's luminous story "Greenleaf."

When he turns in chapter 3 to "the problem of the color line," Wood reveals how complicated were O'Connor's attitudes toward race relations. Although she was a strong advocate of the basic goals of the Civil Rights movement, she disdained condescending, quick fixes that would force blacks and whites into a contrived and ultimately dehumanizing closeness. Wood makes fruitful comparisons and contrasts with another of the South's great writers, Eudora Welty, and with O'Connor's friend, the Northern liberal Maryat Lee; he follows them with careful readings of "The Enduring Chill" and "Everything That Rise Must Converge."

Chapter 4, "The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region" scrutinizes the formal gestures that established both closeness and distance in the social intercourse of blacks and whites in the South. Wood offers an extended treatment of the last story O'Connor wrote, "Judgment Day" (a recast version of her first story, "The Geranium") and an acute theological analysis of her personal favorite, "The Artificial Nigger."

In chapter 5 Wood examines preaching as the 'sacrament' of Southern fundamentalism, drawing on the work of Karl Barth, whom many readers will be surprised to learn was a major influence on O'Connor, and giving voice to her three multigenerational preachers, the nihilist Hazel Motes in "Wise Blood," the teen Bevel Summers in "The River," and the child Lucette Carmody in "The Violent Bear It Away".

In chapter 6, Wood's essay on "demonic nihilism" as "the chief temptation of modernity" demonstrates how full and fair a hearing O'Connor gave the atheists in her fiction, the most memorable of whom is Hulga Hopewell in the painfully comic story "Good Country People." Wood details O'Connor's respect for Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus and resorts once again to Barth, this time for his exploration of the nature of evil.

Chapter 7, "Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness," traces O'Connor's understanding of vocation with a close examination of her uncouth prophet, Mason Tarwater. For O'Connor "the image of God in man must be wrenched from its unnatural thralldom to false lords"; vocation, defined as "the summons to live out the privileges and requirements of the Christian faith" is the touchstone of this wrenching.

Wood's final chapter 8, "Climbing the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O'Connor's Vision of the World to Come, " examines O'Connor's eschatology, focusing on those moments of grace that conclude most of her short stories and choosing as his examples the atheist Rayber in "The Violent Bear It Way" and Mrs. Ruby Turpin in "Revelation."

To his credit, Wood never stumbles over the scandal of O'Connor's stories, never blunts the hard edge of her characters, and never apologizes for the grotesque idiom she chose for her work. Perhaps the greatest merit of his study, though, is his engagement with the irreducibly theological character of O'Connor's fiction and unashamed owning of the truth claims that suffuse it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Catholic-Haunted Ralph C. Wood, May 28, 2006

By 

Gord Wilson "alivingdog.com" (Bellingham, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Paperback)

I ordered this book because Amazon lets you read a page of it and I was immediately hooked. It seems to be a collection of essays, despite lines like "this chapter will attempt to show", and the essays and what they attempt to show vary greatly. I'm not sure who the audience is for this book, because it arguably belongs to the genre of literary criticism, usually aimed at a small and like-minded readership. There are quite a few books about Flannery O'Connor like that.

But this one is different for a few reasons. Lit crit books hardly ever make definite conclusions, at best advancing one of a number of competing theories, drawing it out or justifying it from the text, and supporting it with analysis and commentary.

In Wood's book, O'Connor plays the supporting role for his own theories, sometimes taking center stage and sometimes appearing only marginally. Wood also closes each chapter with an overkill of summing up, forcing the salient texts to his own conclusions (which makes me think the chapters were essays). These seem to me like typically Baptist views, although he makes O'Connor as a Catholic support them.

That would be grounds for me to dismiss the book were that all there was to it. However, Wood masterfully considers O'Connor in relation to her own "true country" of the South, immersing readers in the social millieu in which she wrote. He goes further, tracing the impact of the civil religion of the 'fifties, the odd-duck compromise that drained Protestant and Catholic theology alike, and which O'Connor detested. Like so many writers versed in that era, however, he assumes he can merely refer to Karl Barth and Rheinhold Niebuhr and everyone will know what he means. Thus he never introduces his sources, merely dragging in the big guns to support his ideas.

As two other books have tried to show, this won't fly. The author of Jesus in America shows that civil religion, with its well-intentioned mantra of "deeds not creeds" was so all-encompassing that lay theology books (so called) were best-sellers, whether yea or nay. In The Goodly Word, Ellwood Johnson shows how Puritan ideas and language from Colonial times on became enshrined in increasingly secular literature. Some sense of this process, and its offspring, 'fifties civil religion, is necessary to enlighten Wood's many asides and attributions.

That process reached a peak in the 1920s when H.L. Mencken made the derisive comment that if you threw an egg off a bus you would hit a fundamentalist. His open criticisms of the South, as Wood shows, led to the formation of the Southern Agrarian writers group. Wood tackles the thorny problem of the South--its historical racialism, but he also shows why O'Connor did not adopt the tactics of the Northern attackers, afraid that "the South's few virtues would be destroyed along with its many vices."

O'Connor also found herself at odds with the liberal Catholic version of civil religion, as in her famous comment on the Eucharist: "if it's a symbol, then the hell with it." As Wood sympathetically explains O'Connor's sacramental view, I have no problem understanding why O'Connor was a Catholic. My only question is why Wood isn't one.