Mystery And Manners

A while ago, someone recommended Flannery O'Connor's collection of essays, Mystery And Manners. I finally got around to reading it last week and was floored. Here are some excerpts:

"When you write about backwoods prophets, it is very difficult to get across to the modern reader that you take these people seriously, that you are not making fun of them, but that their concerns are your own, and, in your judgment, central to human life... [The reader] has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence."

"I have observed that most of the best religious fiction of our time is most shocking precisely to those readers who claim to have an intense interest in finding more 'spiritual purpose' - as they like to put it - in modern novels than they can at present detect in them. Today's reader, if he believes in grace at all, sees it as something which can be separated from nature and served to him raw as Instant Uplift. This reader's favorite word is compassion. I don't wish to defame the word. There is a better sense in which it can be used but seldom is - the sense of being in travail with and for creation in its subjection to vanity. This is a sense which implies a recognition of sin; this is a suffering-with, but one which blunts no edges and makes no excuses. When infused into novels, it is often forbidding. Our age doesn't go for it."

"I have found, in short, from the reading of my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil."