Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O'Connor & Sally Fitzgerald & Robert Fitzgerald

Author:Flannery O'Connor & Sally Fitzgerald & Robert Fitzgerald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Essays, Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780374508043
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1969-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Every now and then the novelist looks up from his work long enough to become aware of a general public dissatisfaction with novelists. There’s always a voice coming from somewhere that tells him he isn’t doing his duty, and that if he doesn’t mend his ways soon, there are going to be no more fiction readers—just as, for all practical purposes, there are now no more poetry readers.

Of course, of all the various kinds of artists, the fiction writer is most deviled by the public. Painters and musicians are protected somewhat since they don’t deal with what everyone knows about, but the fiction writer writes about life, and so anyone living considers himself an authority on it.

I find that everybody approaches the novel according to his particular interest—the doctor looks for a disease, the minister looks for a sermon, the poor look for money, and the rich look for justification; and if they find what they want, or at least what they can recognize, then they judge the piece of fiction to be superior.

In the standing dispute between the novelist and the public, the teacher of English is a sort of middleman, and I have occasionally come to think about what really happens when a piece of fiction is set before students. I suppose this is a terrifying experience for the teacher.

I have a young cousin who told me that she reviewed my novel for her ninth-grade English class, and when I asked—without a trace of gratitude—why she did that, she said, “Because I had to have a book the teacher wouldn’t have read.” So I asked her what she said about it, and she said, “I said ‘My cousin wrote this book.’” I asked her if that was all she said, and she said, “No, I copied the rest off the jacket.”

So you see I do approach this problem realistically, knowing that perhaps it has no solution this side of the grave, but feeling nevertheless that there may be profit in talking about it.

I don’t recall that when I was in high school or college, any novel was ever presented to me to study as a novel. In fact, I was well on the way to getting a Master’s degree in English before I really knew what fiction was, and I doubt if I would ever have learned then, had I not been trying to write it. I believe that it’s perfectly possible to run a course of academic degrees in English and to emerge a seemingly respectable Ph.D. and still not know how to read fiction.

The fact is, people don’t know what they are expected to do with a novel, believing, as so many do, that art must be utilitarian, that it must do something, rather than be something. Their eyes have not been opened to what fiction is, and they are like the blind men who went to visit the elephant—each feels a different part and comes away with a different impression.

Now it’s my feeling that if

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