Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and the Other
David Corbett
In her collection of 1990 lectures titled, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison discusses in great detail how some White authors, from Edgar Allen Poe to Kings…
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Writer Unboxed
In her collection of 1990 lectures titled, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison discusses in great detail how some White authors, from Edgar Allen Poe to Kingsley Amis, have used their imaginative powers in depicting “the other,” and how those who’ve done so well have gone about their business.

Specifically, this passage stood out for me:

As a reader (before becoming a writer) I read as I had been taught to do. But books revealed themselves rather differently to me as a writer. In that capacity I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones such others may represent for me. I am drawn to the way all writers do this: the way Homer renders a heart-eating cyclops so that our hearts are wrenched with pity; the way Dostoyevsky compels intimacy with Svidrigailov and Prince Myshkin. I am in awe of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie, Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list.

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from—and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.

I could stop there and we’d have plenty to discuss. What impresses me in this passage is its generosity in recognizing that writers have always written about “the other,” some masterfully, and her belief that this goes beyond observation or even empathy but into the imaginative act of becoming the character. (Note: she doesn’t say “being;” the attempt is always an approach, never fully realized, but without faith in the imagination it can’t be attempted at all.)

Don’t get me wrong—Morrison is perfectly full-throated in her identification of those writers whose conjuring of what she refers to as Africanism represents more an attempt to solidify their defense of Whiteness than a legitimate attempt to understand their Black characters—let alone become them.

Fans of Hemingway in particular may come away from her analysis of To Have and Have Not and The Garden of Eden with something akin to scorched eyeballs. That said, she adds:

An author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, but he is responsible for them. And there is no evidence I know of to persuade me that Hemingway shared Harry’s views [i.e., Harry Morgan, the protagonist of To Have and Have Not.] In point of fact there is strong evidence to suggest the opposite.

What stands out, for me, is Morrison’s recognition that certain White writers actually succeeded in their efforts to portray the Other beyond a need to use them to better defend the bulwark of Whiteness. Beyond the writers already mentioned, she singled out Flannery O’Conner—specifically, her short story “The Artificial Nigger,” which she described with the single word “excellent.”

Given the sensibilities of the agents and editors and administrators currently driving the publication bus, it’s doubtful this story, given its title alone, would be published today. Let’s be clear, it’s a noxious hateful word, and no amount of great writing in its vicinity can redeem it. But that’s not O’Connor’s purpose.

She sought to reveal Southern hypocrisy in matters of race as the social norms known as “Southern manners” were disintegrating under the pressures of integration. The word, used so liberally by the characters she describes so searingly, was a weapon they used to defend the last remnants of their shabby privilege, to define themselves against those Others they so assiduously denied real personhood. Despite that, however, the use of that word makes it all the more unlikely that her fiction would find a publisher in today’s climate. (She was equally severe with liberals and religious hypocrites, by the way; her focus on the lies we tell ourselves to protect our power, our privilege, and our innocence was laser-like in its intensity.) And though there are currently no calls for her to be removed from the canon, nor does she stand in great favor. But think of how impoverished American literature would be without her work.

It’s worth noting that any attempt to remove or dismiss O’Connor likely would not have been promoted by Morrison. The only Black American to win the Nobel Prize in literature—and author of two of the most frequently banned books in this country—she did not condemn even those writers whose depictions of Blacks she found wanting, nor did she call for the banning of their books, the withdrawal of their books from college literature courses, or their being rewritten in accordance with sensitivity reader suggestions as has occurred with Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and Roald Dahl, among others.

On the contrary, her method was to examine their work sensitively and honestly, pulling no punches, placing it in its temporal, social, political, and geographical context, while refusing to jump to any cheap, self-congratulatory judgments.

I would like to suggest we follow Toni Morrison’s example in this regard—not shrinking from analysis of how racism, misogyny, jingoism, or any other ideological bent informs (or deforms) a particular piece of writing, but not falling victim to the sanctimonious self-congratulation of thinking we’ve struck a blow for social justice by summarily dismissing the writers as racist, sexist, fascist, etc., and having their work sanitized or excised altogether.

For the record, I resist using “ist” words or their like—including the current bugbear, “woke”—with respect to individuals for the simple reason I often find the people slinging these epithets guilty of the exact thing they claim to be condemning: objectification.

By calling someone a racist, a Marxist, a sexist, a secularist, etc., you are reducing them to a caricature, dehumanizing them, which is the sin at the root of racism, sexism, and so on. There are undoubtedly those whose ideas, statements, writings, actions, polices, practices, and so on reflect long-held or habitual biases, sometimes of the crudest and most hateful or malevolent kind. Even so, I retain the belief that human beings are capable of reflection and change. Pinning anyone to a stereotype to convince yourself you exist on a higher moral plain strikes me as a cheap shot (and I say that fully aware I’ve been guilty of this fault myself).

Meanwhile, given Toni Morrison’s pointing me in that direction, I’ve returned to the work of Flannery O’Connor this summer, and have once again found myself amazed.

Inside the cover of my copy of her Complete Stories, I discovered a copy of an article from the New Yorker, written in 2001 by the theater critic and literature professor Hilton Als.

Like Morrison, Als is Black. And like Morrison, he finds much to admire in O’Connor’s writing.

He singles out her 1964 story “Revelation” for analysis:

O’Connor’s vision of the postindustrial South—with its Winn-Dixie stores, its automobiles piled up in the junkyard of the Lord—as a modern version of the fall was all her own. But what fall? What loss of innocence? That of the slaves who became indentures servants and then “niggers,” who dot her pages like flies? No: in O’Connor’s fictional universe, the Whites in power are the only ones who can afford to be innocent of their surroundings. O’Connor’s most profound gift was her ability to describe impartially the bourgeoisie she was born into, to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order.

Als then cites a passage from the story where Mrs. Turpin, the story’s protagonist, complains of being physically attacked and insulted (she’s called “an old wart hog from hell”) by a young white woman from Wellesley while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room. In the passage, Mrs. Turpin is comforted and complimented by several Blacks who work for her.

O’Connor allows us to see what Mrs. Turpin’s pride hides from her: how the Blacks who work for her condescend to her, how they hide their intelligence so that she won’t be tempted to interfere in their lives…

No reader can help but be amused and disturbed by this passage, which is representative of O’Connor’s subtle observation of a world that was not her own, but which informed every inch of the one she inhabited. Blacks may have spent much of their lives on the margins, but she understood the ways in which they entered the circle. The theatrical modesty and duplicity exhibited by these Blacks who are an audience for Mrs. Turpin’s troubles—despite the fact she will never be one for theirs—are all just a part of the Southern code of manners.

Als concludes his article with this:

One can hear [O’Connor’s] syntax and thoughts in the stories of Raymond Carver, in Robert Duvall’s brilliant movie The Apostle, in the Samuel L. Jackson character’s final monologue in Pulp Fiction. Her work has moved away from the South as she defined and knew it, all the way to Hollywood, where Americans have embraced it, hearing in O’Connor’s voice the uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.

In that phrase, “uneasy and unavoidable union,” I hear an echo of Morrison’s call to the immeasurably difficult task of becoming, with its “danger zones” that the Other may represent for a writer.

And that is why I consider it so disconcerting that, given the current publishing zeitgeist, where nothing should ever be allowed if it risks making someone “uncomfortable,” this genius’s work would likely never see the light of day if she were submitting her stories for publication now. Not merely because of the “‘niggers’ who dot her pages like flies” (because they abound on the tongues of her White Southern characters) but her presumption to write from the perspective of a Black man (e.g., “Parker’s Back”). Not even the generous commendations of Black writers such as Toni Morrison and Hilton Als could spare her.

And that’s the pity. For better than a great many other writers, she depicts the segregated world she knew with a blistering lack of sentimentality (unlike, citing one example, Tennessee Williams), and allows us to see in haunting detail the specious nature of the call to return to “real America,” or the belief that Judeo-Christian values can save us. A devout Catholic surrounded by Bible-belt Protestantism, she had a razor-sharp sense of how false piety contributed to the communal self-delusion that created segregation, justified it, and needed it so desperately.

What do you think of Toni Morrison’s claim that writing about those outside our personal experience must go beyond looking or looking at, or even “taking oneself intact into the other?”

Do you believe it is necessary, or even possible, to become one’s characters, especially those in the “corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination?”

Do you think there is any room for writing about people outside one’s own “lived experience?” If so, what are the guidelines for doing so? What are the boundaries of one’s lived experience?