I worried I would have to account for myself, explain why it
makes sense for the Federal government to give me, an English professor, money
to go study O’Connor in Georgia. Like someone bracing for an interview, I
started interrogating myself: Do we
really need to visit a writer’s home when the thing she chose to give us is her
work? If we read O’Connor’s stories through the lens of Andalusia or of
Milledgeville, do we risk substituting our own personal projections for
interpretations based on plausible textual evidence? Then, like someone
trained in criticism, I started interrogating my own questions: Isn’t the good of O’Connor’s work, like the
good of a visit to Andalusia, self-evident? What makes me think I need to
defend the value of these things?
Cunningly, I avoided the camera, and instead I started
talking over these questions with my fellow institute participants. We discussed
the risks of a hagiographic approach to Andalusia, one that would substitute shrine
for home. Even as O’Connor insisted on the mysterious presence of the sacred in
the material world, she also resisted the impulse to swap an “edifying” story
for a true one. I think a brief example here will demonstrate what I mean. In
the spring of 1959, O’Connor was invited by the Sister Superior of Our Lady of
Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home to come visit Atlanta in order to write a
biography of Mary Ann Long, a remarkable young girl whose short life and time
as a patient at the Home was deeply meaningful to Mary Ann’s community. In her
own account of the situation, O’Connor describes recoiling from the offer to
visit and write the book. She states, “Stories of pious children tend to be
false. This may be because they are told by adults, who see virtue where their
subjects would see only a practical course of action; or it may be because such
stories are written to edify and what is written to edify usually ends up
amusing.” Borrowing the Sister Superior’s phrase, O’Connor writes, “I did not
wish to imbibe Mary Ann’s atmosphere. I was not capable of writing her story.” [1]
In walking around the rooms, barns, and fields of Andalusia,
it might seem possible to try to imbibe O’Connor’s atmosphere, and from that, to
forge connections between the physical space where she spent much of her life
and the work she created in that space. As my fellow scholar and new friend, Alison
Staudinger, pointed out, that approach might be tempting, but it’s also risky
if we don’t examine our own assumptions.
Here O’Connor’s awareness is useful, highlighting how sight
is limited and how intentions can backfire. We can render in ultimately silly
terms what we might intend as meaningful. By touring Andalusia with Alison and
a bunch of other great partners in this conversation, we started to investigate
the impulse readers might have to project themselves onto writers and the oddness
of a capacity to forget that writers are real people to begin with. We spent
hours discussing what we think about the relationship between humans and the
material world and the nature of the value an object might retain because of
who may have owned it previously.
The two-person camera crew, Ben and Chelsea, caught up with
me and Alison eventually, and they joined right in the conversation, welcoming
our inquiries, adding their observations, giving us space to process how our
visit to Andalusia shaped our thinking, and laying my camera shyness to rest by
using our taped interview for in-house purposes only. Haha.
You may not have the good fortune of touring Andalusia at a time
that corresponds with a visit from Alison, Ben, and Chelsea, but I highly
recommend rounding up your best conversation partners, touring its sitting
rooms and milking rooms, and examining your own impressions of what this space
does and doesn’t mean for how we read and reread O’Connor. You might find, as I
do, that the value of her work, and of Andalusia, are self-evident.
[1] “Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann.” Flannery
O’Connor: Collected Works. (New York: Library of America, 1988): 822-3.
Terrific essay, Ali!
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