This paper is an attempt to answer the above question. People ask, ‘Why do the American southern writers write about freaks?’ O’Connor replies, ‘It is because we can see them!’ I propose here to offer some philosophical clues that might be helpful in understanding her work and appreciating what she is doing.

Where to begin? Well, we can begin where she began. She tells us in her letters that she ‘cut her aesthetic teeth on Art & Scholasticism’,Footnote ² that is on the aesthetics of the Thomist, Jacques Maritain. She had the J.F. Scanlon translation of the second edition (1927) of Maritain’s first major aesthetic work.Footnote ³ According to E. Jane Doering and Ruthann Knechel Johansen, ‘the two thinkers to whom O’Connor refers most frequently in her essays and in her letters about ideas on art, the artist, reality, and mystery are St Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Maritain’.Footnote ⁴ Upon reading the latter, she became convinced of the truth of many of his aesthetic principles and they became foundational for her. While St Thomas did not have a separate aesthetic theory, Maritain saw himself as adapting his principles to forge one.Footnote ⁵

Key to Maritain’s theory is the idea that art is a virtue or habitus of the practical intellect – it is founded upon reasoning – and the good at which art, reason in making, aims is none other than the work itself; and that art begins where human knowledge begins, with the senses, while at the same time, it must involve the whole person, conscious and preconscious. She upholds Maritain’s and St Thomas’s criteria of beauty when she advises writers to give ‘their strict attention to the order, proportion, and radiance of what they are making’.Footnote ⁶

Her work is not primarily a critique of Southern religious customs. They were a part of the landscape, not the subject matter. She worked within the culture and environment of the ‘Christ-haunted’ south. We find freaks such as Hazel Motes, the central character in Wise Blood, preaching the Church of God without Christ. In ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’, we fear the killer on the loose who is called the ‘misfit’; and we also fear for the self-centred grandmother as we experience the distortions of these characters and their actions. What comes through is not an exploration about preaching or religious practices, but the spiritual realities within and around fallen human beings and the decisions they face concerning their acceptance or rejection of the grace of God.Footnote ⁷ It is the inside of things that is most real, important, and permanent; and this inside is on the outside of her characters, where we can ‘see’ them. Author Angelina StanfordFootnote ⁸ claims there is a medieval influence here. And since O’Connor thinks that humans are fallen creatures and distorted on the inside; she will in a way display this on the outside where we can ‘see’ this with our senses.Footnote ⁹

O’Connor repeatedly says that she knows that her audience will not easily follow her. She knows that we are largely participants in a secular humanism who see all of reality as being pretty near the ‘surface of things’.Footnote ¹⁰ And we might suspect that all of the greatest of human ideas and powers will eventually evaporate under the sciences. But for O’Connor, the human person is a mystery. It is intelligible, but because of the human powers of intelligence and freedom, beyond full comprehension.

So how do you write for the reader who thinks everything is physical? Well, in the first place, for O’Connor, if you are going to be a good writer, you will work in the physical and how reality appears to the senses, and you will be faithful to that. On the other hand, you are not going be a prisoner of appearances. You are not going to take these physical appearances as the last word. You are going to try to get at what O’Connor calls the ‘texture of existence’. Following her mentor, Maritain, art and poetry attempt to reach out and explore the existential and spiritual aspects of things, including the tremendous realities of human freedom, motivations, inclinations, sympathies, desires, and aspirations. These existential aspects are primarily known, not through ordinary discursive and scientific knowledge but through what Maritain called a knowledge by connaturality, a knowledge through intentional emotion. For O’Connor, human beings are out of alignment in the exercise of the powers of the human soul. We are fallen. In one sense, we are already spiritually ‘freakish’. But we have grown used to seeing ourselves and others as ‘natural’. So the writer must distort what he or she ‘sees’ in order to get beyond the appearances and reveal the inner truth of his characters. It is like the Socratic method, an elenchus, but one artistically done. It is like a Pascal’s Pensée, revealing to us our inscrutable human condition.

But might you object at this point and ask, ‘Isn’t she, with her world of freaks and the grotesque, falsifying what she ‘sees’?’ Why not complain with Regina O’Connor and ask Flannery, as a Catholic writer, to write another Gone with the Wind or a book that will inspire us?Footnote ¹¹

When we make requests such as these, we are thinking that a good story is one that should lift us up and show us what is good in the world. But, according to O’Connor, such a simple picture actually falsifies the picture of the world. It whitewashes it. The truth about the world is that it has both good and evil in it. Both have to be acknowledged. Thus, after she, like a prophet, is through with us, we might not like what we see in her world and in ourselves. Sometimes, she did not like what she found in herself. She criticizes novelists who, in trying to be edifying, ‘leave out half or three fourths of the facts of human existence’.Footnote ¹² She illumines her point in her discussion of Cardinal Spellman’s novel, The Foundling. She writes, ‘The novelist who deliberately misuses his talent for some good purpose may be committing no sin, but he is certainly committing a grave inconsistency, for he is trying to reflect God with what amounts to a practical untruth.’Footnote ¹³

Still, the word ‘distortion’ occurs no less than 11 times throughout her collected prose work on fiction, Mystery and Manners, suggesting that this idea was very important to her. However, it is rather an odd idea. Given the idea that storytelling is telling us something ‘true’ about reality or at least resonating with it, one would think that people who distort might be going the wrong way. Might we, in fact, be prevented from seeing reality? This leads us to the idea of artistic imitation. What does it mean to artistically imitate the world?

I claim that O’Connor fully follows her mentor, Jacques Maritain, and his thoughts on this notion. In his magnum opus, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, he reveals his own curious relationship with the word. First, he says, that the ‘word is hopelessly wrong’,Footnote ¹⁴ and it is ‘misleading and unhappy!’Footnote ¹⁵ We sense that there are issues here and we will need some distinctions. In the field of painting, Maritain asks himself, is painting supposed to imitate reality? If so, what keeps it from being trompe-l’oeil? Etienne Gilson, for example, Maritain’s eminent Thomist colleague, thought the imitation was a wrongheaded notion, for it implied this repugnant idea of art ‘tricking the eye’. Gilson held that art is about creation not imitation and it cannot be both.Footnote ¹⁶ However, Maritain always agreed with the idea that imitation is never about servile copying or deception. In the 1930 edition of Art & Scholasticism that O’Connor had read, Maritain wrote, in fact, that ‘the reproduction or exact copy of nature thus appears as the object of an impossible pursuit – a concept which vanishes when an attempt is made to define it’.Footnote ¹⁷ But we might ask, what is left? How does or should imitation work? Maritain offers us this: ‘In reality it is not a question of slavishly imitating the object, but, what is entirely different, of manifesting with the utmost fidelity, at the cost of every “distortion” which may be necessary, the form or ray of intelligibility the brilliance of which is apprehended in the real’.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, ‘transformation which owes its simplicity to spiritual fidelity to the form shining in things, and their profound life’ is necessary.Footnote ¹⁹ While, of course, there is also artificial distortion, ‘for distortion in the pejorative sense of the term, which is to say for violence or deceit, and art withers to this extent’, there is a genuine form of distortion.Footnote ²⁰ He adds, and in painting, you can ‘find these in the masters and in the greatest of them all Rembrandt … many instances of “transformations, distortions, abbreviations and redispositions”’.Footnote ²¹ Ultimately, in his mature aesthetic work, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Maritain will say, ‘Such a genuine concept of “imitation” affords a ground and a justification for the boldest kinds of transposition, transfiguration, deformation, or recasting of natural appearances, in so far as they are a means to make the work manifest intuitively the transapparent reality which has been grasped by the artist’.Footnote ²² He adds that ‘natural appearances’ – one can here think of landscapes, models, still life, sunsets, sky, etc., that which most think are precisely the objects that are to be imitated, are not so. Rather, ‘It is through the instrumentality of natural appearances – necessarily recast, perhaps drastically so – that the same secret meaning can be intuitively revealed in and by the work’.Footnote ²³ We may remember, as Maritain always does, the iconic phrase of St Thomas that ‘art imitates nature in her operation’,Footnote ²⁴ as Maritain sums up the issue by saying:

In her use of distortion, O’Connor follows in Maritain’s footsteps here. For example, what she says about Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is enlightening:

Of her own work, she speaks about describing a baptism:

What is important here is her idea of reality. It is not just about skin and bones, neurons and survival. She is after what is really active in human nature and the ‘insides’ of persons. It would follow that if one were a materialist, one would never have the need to distort when they imitated reality. But as Erwin Schrödinger once said, while the scientific picture of our world may have our bodies in it, it does not have us in it. There are no human persons in the scientific view of the world.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, if you wish to explore real persons rather than just bodies and really capture them with their inner and free movements, you are going to have to distort. This may be the reason why Maritain says ‘for each work, poetry changes it [to] a world more real than the reality offered to the senses’.Footnote ²⁹

You distort because you cannot stay at the surfaces of things. O’Connor does not want her readers left on the shores of the surface. She provokes us, the readers, to dive down into things. Her writing is not about reporting or about telling but about showing. This is difficult for the writer to do. When people imply that ‘writing fiction is an escape from reality’, O’Connor responds, ‘I’m always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.’Footnote ³⁰ As a result of this ‘plunge’, it is worth remembering her promise that ‘if a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader’.Footnote ³¹ In sum, art gets at the fullness of reality, more than we can ‘siphon’ off with our current abstractions and categories.

The storyteller must be a realist and a super-realist at the same time. He must be faithful to the appearances, but he must be a realist of ‘distances’ as well. Simultaneously, he must capture the surface and the depths. O’Connor claims that ‘art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other’.Footnote ³² ‘The author is the one who sees near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up.’Footnote ³³ He is ‘looking for the image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees’.Footnote ³⁴

Ultimately, for O’Connor, the key to distortion is this:

In other places in the world of art, we can see distortion taking place. When Vincent Van Gogh once struggled with painting the anatomy of the migrant human figures next to him in the fields, he justified it by writing that true painters do not paint the way things are, but as they feel they are. ‘My great desires are to make such inaccuracies, changes to reality, that they become lies, but [lies] more valid than the literal truth’.Footnote ³⁶

With regard to movies, distortion is writ large in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. The whole premise of the movie is based upon a logical distortion, a blazing violation of the principle of non-contradiction: the perception by a man named George who perceives his own non-existence and of the world that has become distorted without him. And the viewer is shown, far beyond what any appearance could, the shining value of human persons and their connection with one another.

In conclusion, given that the soul of man may just be the most resplendent thing in the cosmos that we know about, the soul’s dynamism in knowing and loving would be spectacular if we could see it! And St Augustine had shown us, and O’Connor concurs, this dynamism is always aspiring towards our creator. As Angelina Stanford notes of O’Connor’s characters, ‘her souls are filled with even the most unsuspecting people discovering that they have souls that are longing for God. And that what they are longing for will break through in unexpected ways. And it’s going to shock you because you have pretended that there is no transcendent realm’.Footnote ³⁷ Now, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could ever get a glimpse of these souls? That is, if they were on the outside of their bodies rather than hidden from view. Maybe, perhaps, this is what Flannery O’Connor is all about. You might discover some amazing things on the insides of people.

In a recent biography of C.S. Lewis, I came across an amazing ‘inside’ real-life situation that reminds me of O’Connor:

It is a quote from a letter from a well-known self-identified atheist to his mistress:

I believe that Flannery could have really sympathized with such a man. Maybe she could have written a story for him? Maybe, she could have rearranged the appearances of the world for him so that he could have made that vital connection between his outside and his inside with all of its pain and spiritual aspirations – with the ‘evidence’ of God they bring. Who knows?

This person, by the way, was Bertrand Russell.