Jessica Hooten Wilson was raised to believe that “Christians should dwell on the good and the beautiful,” she writes in her introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage: A Behind the Scenes Look at a Work in Progress (Brazos). That belief did not translate well to the pages of the literary fiction she aspired to write. Her mentor, a “40-something Ph.D.,” told her, “You have talent…[o]nly you misuse it to turn out these parodies of Saved by the Bell,” the popular, saccharine 90s high school television comedy. “If you’re a Christian,” she recalls him saying, “write like this.” He handed her a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the story of a wandering tramp who cons a woman out of her car by marrying (and later abandoning) her disabled daughter. It was in this first, formative experience with O’Connor’s unsettling story that Wilson began to understand that “faith should never be used to sanitize fiction.”
Now a literary scholar and author of several books, including Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Wipf and Stock) and Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice (Baker), Wilson spent 10 years poring over a folder of 378 typed pages and handwritten notes by Flannery O’Connor that offer a peek at what she might have written if she hadn’t died of complications from lupus at the age of 39. The material, which O’Connor titled Why Do the Heathen Rage? had, until now, been overlooked by O’Connor scholars, who thought it too insubstantial to warrant publishing.
Whether or not Why Do the Heathen Rage? deserves to be called an “unfinished novel,” the publication of the extant pages, and Wilson’s painstaking work to show the concordances between them and her letters and previously published works, is worth celebrating. O’Connor’s final project, even in its incomplete form, speaks to the cultural moment we inhabit. More concerning are the ways that Wilson’s commentary casts a long, obscuring shadow, especially when it comes to race and racism.
O’Connor’s protagonist is Walter, a sickly, 28-year-old would-be writer who has returned home to his family’s farm to recuperate. Walter develops a relationship via letters with Oona, a young, idealistic white woman who works at Fellowship Farms, a racially integrated utopian farming cooperative. Walter keeps up this correspondence with Oona as a kind of social experiment. He pretends to be a Black farmer as a means of cynically, at first, probing and testing the authenticity of her convictions.
This scenario is inspired, as Wilson points out in one of the several interstitial essays meant to contextualize and interpret the unfinished novel, by John Howard Griffin’s 1961 Black Like Me, in which the white, Catholic journalist darkens his skin and recounts his experiences traveling through the deep South impersonating a Black man. O’Connor looked suspiciously upon Griffin’s project, as she did most writerly attempts to use the power of storytelling to drag the violence of racism out into the light.
For her part, Wilson assumes the role of literary archaeologist, mining O’Connor’s personal correspondence and hand-written working notes in an attempt to paint a picture of the writer at a crossroads. In a 1963 letter, written the year before her death, she confides to Benedictine Sister Mariella Gable: “I’ve reached the point where I can’t do again what I know I can do well, and the larger things I need to do now, I doubt my capacity for doing.” Wilson’s detective work is compelling, and the reader becomes engrossed in searching with her for pieces that will flesh out this artistic puzzle.
We learn that O’Connor understood her next novel to be a sequel of sorts to “The Enduring Chill,” a 1958 story about Asbury, a character whose situation comically mirrors O’Connor’s own: “a young artist who returns home to the South from New York because he fears his death is near,” though it turns out Asbury’s malady is only an allergy to milk. In Why Do the Heathen Rage? Asbury becomes Walter, and he’s given further depth and dimension as a “secular contemplative” who is baptized at the age of 13 by a country preacher and “transformed into a vigilant man of God” who uses his pen to express his condemnation of society’s evils.
Beginning the story with a baptism would be a departure and new challenge for O’Connor, whose bread and butter was stories, Wilson observes, “structur[ed]…to lead toward a character’s moment of grace, the moment where each may choose whether or not to believe in God.” Unfortunately, there is nothing like an ending in the manuscript pages, and O’Connor left no notes hinting at what she might do. Unsatisfied with no fully realized answer to this question, Wilson writes a “potential ending” to O’Connor’s manuscript. In a section she titles “A Presumptuous Attempt to End the Novel” she does not just speculate; she composes an ending in a style that is intended to mimic O’Connor’s. She writes: “Borrowing lines from O’Connor’s unfinished manuscripts—both The Violent Bear it Away and Why Do the Heathen Rage?—I filled in parts of the story, compiling a concluding scene for Walter, a moment of grace, as O’Connor always sought to offer her characters.”
She admits that “[r]eaders might find such an attempt at imitation presumptuous,” citing in her defense Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s book of poems, Andalusian Hours (Paraclete Press), 101 sonnets written in the voice of O’Connor. After all, she concludes: “All acts of imagination are presumptuous.”
It is here that some readers may feel inclined to cock an eyebrow. An act of imagination is not, by definition, presumptuous. The imaginative act can certainly be audacious and risky; in fact, acts of protest-minded or social justice-oriented imagination might even be seen as unwelcome—O’Connor certainly thought so in regard to John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and Eudora Welty’s short story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” a searing, fictionalized account of the assassination of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers that O’Connor backhandedly dismissed, in a 1963 letter to her friend Betty Hester, as “topical.”
In truth, outside of blockbuster Hollywood deals and celebrity memoirs, and the rare commissioned work of art, no significant act of imagination is ever asked for. This is precisely the power of art; it is unexpected and useless. This is very different than presumption. The purest impulses for acts of imagination come from the craftsperson’s compulsion to make beautiful things. The Christian artist cannot do otherwise, a perspective that O’Connor wholeheartedly believed and derived from her close reading and admiration for Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, especially his 1920 book Art and Scholasticism (Cluny), a heavily annotated copy of which was found in her library.
It is in this unquestionably presumptuous act, and her defense of it, that Wilson’s ethos as interpretative guide begins to wear thin.
In an earlier section of the book titled “Epistolary Blackface,” she argues that O’Connor’s well-publicized use of the n-word in correspondence was more a comic and ironic persona used sparingly between friends than an intentionally callous expressions of a belief that Black people are somehow less human than whites. In support of the claim that O’Connor was willfully engaging in a kind of blackface, she makes a further, even more implausible, claim that O’Connor was ignorant to the social and theological implications of the n-word and cross burnings, and by extension, to their connections with the long history of racial violence in the American South. Wilson defends O’Connor’s ignorance as evidence that she “needed time to reflect on contemporary events in order to transform them into fiction that spoke to the deeper reality.”
In making such spurious claims, Hooten Wilson relies on a curious refrain—“For those of us in the 21st century…”—whenever she attempts to put into context what she sees as O’Connor’s social and theological blind spots or ways of thinking and speaking that reveal her racism and ignorance. This regular use of “we” and “us” comes off not just as a rhetorical appeal to contemporary readers who must admit to reading through the “woke” prism of 2024 but also as an appeal to set aside our own personal instincts and conscience.
Wilson’s defense of O’Connor is perhaps best described as an attempt to create a sense of plausible deniability: “[S]he may not have heard from any friends about their sufferings; she may not have received the news about the numerous lynchings and murders throughout her state.” “Their” in this sentence is uncertain with regard to its referent, but it seems she means O’Connor’s Black friends. Whatever the case may be, both of these hypotheses hold little water, especially considering what we know of her reading habits and specific references to the Civil Rights movement in her letters.
While no one can doubt O’Connor’s commitment to the fundamental teachings of the church, when it came to any progressive-minded extrapolation of the gospel message to address contemporary social issues, she routinely balked. This is especially true when it came to integration and the aims of the Civil Rights movement. “I hope to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral,” she wrote. O’Connor’s own defense can be found most saliently in her response to the suggestion that she meet with James Baldwin when he visited Georgia, she declined, writing, “I observe the traditions of the society I feed on—it’s only fair.”
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell explores this two-mindedness concerning race and racism in her necessary and important book Radical Ambivalence (Fordham University Press). To center O’Donnell’s book of verse imitating O’Connor, rather than her complex and thoroughly sourced scholarly work on O’Connor’s attitudes towards race, is a clear and clattering omission.
O’Donnell writes about redacted punchlines to racist jokes in O’Connor’s letters, while Wilson, following the lead of her mentor Ralph Woods, the so-called “Dean of O’Connor Studies”—to whom Hooten Wilson dedicates the book—makes elaborate and genteel excuses for O’Connor’s racism in order to save the general reader dwelling too much on what she seems to believe are ephemeral sins that only distract from the universal and timeless power of O’Connor’s work. In other words, we should forgive the startling racism of she who builds such stolid monuments to grace and redemption. Wilson seems bent on saving O’Connor from herself by doubling down: “[O’Connor] thought such crusades [like Welty’s] made for bad fiction” and that she instead was holding out to “write eternal visions that energized long-lasting action.”
Such sentimentality is what causes Wilson’s commentary to run aground. As she sets the stage for her “presumptuous” attempt at ending O’Connor’s novel, she cites Black theologian James H. Cones’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis Books), evoking the premise of his book but sanitizing it, writing that the cross “offer[s] hope beyond [the lynching tree].” This might seem a subtle point, bordering on a game of “gotcha,” but Cone is clear that the cross of the crucified Jesus is not just a “theological concept” or “magical talisman of salvation” but a direct connection between “Calvary and the lynching tree in American experience.” In the chapter “The Recrucified Christ in Black Literary Imagination,” Cone is not interested in scolding a writer like O’Connor, who Wilson depicts as viewing cross burnings and news of lynchings one or two counties over from “her privileged place within her white world.” Cone is focused on how Black artists, like Countee Cullen, soberly saw the South as “crucifying Christ again.”
Is this to condemn O’Connor’s work to the scrap heap of other artists whose personal transgressions and blind spots distract from their art? No, it is not a condemnation; it is instead a terrible embrace. Like Judas’ kiss in the garden, revulsion either gives way to an understanding of how O’Connor’s sinful, hypocritical actions are a betrayal of what she seems to stand for in her fiction, or we condemn her and toss the book across the room and risk missing a true to call to Christian witness.
Either way, the whole O’Connor, the unsanitized O’Connor, is more—not less—human. Wilson, in her zeal to make a saint of O’Connor and of us, unintentionally robs her work and life of its startling and complex witness.
Image: Cover of Why do the Heathen Rage?
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