Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, and the Other
By David Corbett | July 14, 2023 |
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?
Do you agree that Flannery O’Connor would have difficulty finding a publisher today?
David Corbett (he/him) is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Do They Know I’m Running?, The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, and The Truth Against the World. He has also published the story collection Thirteen Confessions and the novella The Devil Prayed and Darkness Fell.
David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in a broad array of magazines and anthologies, with pieces twice selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
His non-fiction has appeared in numerous venues, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Narrative, Zyzzyva, MovieMaker, The Writer, and Writer’s Digest.
He has taught both online and in classroom settings through the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program, Book Passage, LitReactor, 826 Valencia, The Grotto in San Francisco, and at numerous writing conferences across the US, Canada, and Mexico. In January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage), and Writer’s Digest published his follow-up, The Compass of Character, in October 2019.
To write with insight about a world you know well is not wrong. To portray the people in it with a purpose is worthwhile. Where offense begins is when the story enterprise is lazy and characters are written too easily.
Fiction works when it surprises us; stereotypes do not surprise. Story worlds tell us truths about our own world but the force of truth is lacking when what’s revealed about a story world, meaning ours, merely reinforces what we may already know or believe.
Flannery O’Connor was sharp and unsparing. She wrote about the South honestly. She was qualified. She has not done harm, I think, because her mirror isn’t self-flattering or falsely pitying but rather is truthful. Toni Morrison wrote from one direction, Flannery O’Connor from another, but they both got to the same place with stories that surprise us with how things really are.
Or maybe there’s integrity in puncturing balloons that is less objectionable than when inflating them with helium? Regardless, I suspect that writing about the other isn’t bad per se, it’s all in how you approach it.
“I suspect that writing about the other isn’t bad per se, it’s all in how you approach it.”
Couldn’t agree more. If only such wer ethe prevailing winds in the NY publishing world these days.
Sorry for the typo: If only such were the prevailing winds in the NY publishing world these days.
“Where offense begins is when the story enterprise is lazy and characters are written too easily.”
I suspect plenty of people would disagree with you on this point, perhaps not in theory, but certainly in practice.
My sense is that some portraits of some people will simply be met with resistance regardless of how much care the author takes in crafting characters, simply because people will resist the negative portrayal. For example, a white writer who sets her story in the time/place/world that Iceberg Slim wrote about would likely be skewered online.
Conversely, there’s a great deal of tolerance for laziness in writing and drafting characters that are caricatures if those people have certain backgrounds, e.g., rural, working class, whites, regardless of who the author is.
I meant to also answer your question about O’Connor having difficulty finding a publisher today. Yes, that seems undeniable. I also suspect if O’Connor was writing today and was interested in publishing her work, she would have never written the same stories.
I would be surprised if there are many authors today who don’t approach their work with some (or a lot of) thought about what the potential backlash may be, particularly if they’re hoping to find a home for a debut novel.
But isn’t it rather sad that a writer today cannot write as honestly about the human condition as it is in 2023 without having to do some sanitizing in order to get published? I’m struggling with the need to put “trigger warnings” on my next book, as my publisher has suggested, because of this current phase of super sensitivity.
Jamie Beck did an excellent post here at Writer Unboxed back in January on the issue of trigger warnings, and it generated an incredibly thougtful comment thread: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2023/01/24/to-warn-or-not-to-warn-the-controversy-around-trigger-warnings-in-literature/
To provide some context for my comment re:
“Where offense begins is when the story enterprise is lazy and characters are written too easily.”
It’s naïve to believe that “reader” will only take offense if the story enterprise is lazy or characters are written too easily. When the mob takes out the pitchforks, a thoughtful articulation of the merits or demerits of a piece or what the author did or did not intend doesn’t happen. The vast majority of people in the mob haven’t even read the work and won’t on principle. Mobs do not engage in intellectual exercises.
“I suspect that writing about the other isn’t bad per se, it’s all in how you approach it.”
If only that were true.
Coincidentally I have just completed The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, the the 550-page collection of her short-fiction work. Repeatedly during my reading I kept thinking that this work would be widely condemned today — and likely pulled from shelves everywhere. if it had even been published. So I’m glad to read that my interpretation and appreciation of her work does not at best make me a moron — and at worst, a racist. Thank you, David, for sharing your brave and timely insights on this issue.
Right there with you, Jim. I have that same collection, and I frequently find myself, upon reading one of those stories, being stunned by how fresh, how scathing, how insightful they are — and how elegantly written.
If you get a chance, pick up Morrison’s Writing in the Dark as well. It’s less than 100 pages and really made me think long, deep, and hard about what it means to try to write across “label lines.”
I’ll read Morrison’s Writing in the Dark! Thank you.
I think the title is Playing in the Dark. Sorry. Unless there is another book by that title.
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Powerful, this argument. O’Connor had a lived experience that she could apply to her work. She wanted to tell the truth. She knew that creating stories that revealed the society she lived in was her truth. Morrison also wrote that truth, but did being Black give her more right to do so? At first thought, yes, but as Don remarks, there has to be a fulsome understanding…no lazy writing. Fiction writers should create characters whose message can convey a reality that exists. Don has encouraged me to move forward with a novel that contains scenes of power, but might be offense to some readers…a child is raped. Publishing today has too many rules, many fears. If I can, I will probably go hybrid. I believe in my story…there is no Black on white in my story. But readers sometimes fear truth. So do we still believe…truth will set you free? Did we ever believe it? Fear seems to arise when writers reveal the dark parts of our society. Just read the news. It’s still there, blatantly there.
“It’s still there, blatantly there.”
Indeed, Elizabeth. I’m reading two books right now on that subject: BRINGING THE WAR HOME: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Kathleen Belew; and FREEDOM’S DOMINION: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power by Jefferson R. Cowie. Both highly recommended. Both bring the point home, disturbingly so.
“Morrison also wrote that truth, but did being Black give her more right to do so? At first thought, yes.” Interestingly, Morrison herself would disagree with that. And as HIlton Als pointed out, O’Connor’s subject was the false consciousness of the Southern white bourgeoisie she grew up in. And as Morrison argues, that would be impossible with out the Black human beings onto which those Whites projected so much of their own fear and trembling.
Thank you for this! My writing partner and I discuss this topic when writing diverse characters. This always makes me nervous. I’m afraid to offend and make myself look bad. Until I become more confident in writing diverse characters, I’ll not do it. My hope is that all my readers see themselves in my characters, as I stay way from hair and skin descriptions. And unless I’m directly quoting someone in a nonfiction piece, my characters’ dialogues don’t have accents or drawls. I don’t know how to handle this any better. I’m afraid I’m white washing everyone though, which doesn’t reflect society.
Hi, Dawn. I know. Writing only about members of one’s own race denies the reality of America (even here in the Hudson Valley, which is Whitelandia). So we have to ask ourselves: how can I write honestly, empathetically, and truthfully about people outside my personal “lived experience” — a phrase I frankly find bizarre. Do people of different ethnicities whom I know personally, including close friends, nonetheless remain outside my “lived experience?” The historical novel falls by the roadside if we’re required to restrict ourselves only to those experiences we’ve personally lived through. And as writers as diverse as Francine Prose and Toni Morrison make clear, such a view diminishes the imaginative powers of the artist.
In the first comment above, Don points out that the issue is, or should be, how it’s done. But we live in an era of online mobbing and shaming — and caving to those who indulge in it. There’s a preciousness and sanctimonious self-congratulation to that I think both Morrison and especially O’Connor would consider a prime example of false consciousness.
One of the underlying fears in all this is that, if White writers are allowed to write freely about ethnic experiences, it will deprive writers of color opportunities to see their work published. This concern is playing out right now in the Country & Western music world, where Luke Combs has a #1 hit in covering Tracy Chapman’s iconic “Fast Car.” (Chapman has very graciously congratulated him on the song’s success, even though it’s common knowledge that Nashville would have had no use for the song if it remained the work of a gay Black woman.) To a lot of Black artists, this conjures memories of Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” disappearing once Elvis covered it. Other examples abound. And Black crime writers experiencing great press and sales today are not unaware of a previous “awakening” in the 1990s that petered out pretty quickly. All too soon it devolved into, “We already have one of those.”
Such fears are well founded, and they deserve our respect and attention. However, I also believe that readers today — ironically — are far more prone to read outside their own “lived experience” than ever before. I’m hoping that creates a new creative space for everyone, so that we can move closer to an egalitarian, multi-cultural society.
For readers to read outside their own lived experience, writers have to be published. Which means that Alex Perez’s “Brooklyn Ladies” (among others of their ilk) need to expand their horizons. As much as I wish that to be, reality bites. Chances of that happening in today’s climate favors the minus side of nil.
This is powerful, David. You’ve given me a lot to ponder as well as some new material to add to my summer reading list.
Do I believe there is “room for writing about people outside of one’s ‘lived experience’? Oh yes! Not only room but significant value in doing so when trying to grasp and understand what informs another’s (or others) worldview. Will we get it right? Maybe, or at least we’ll do our best for that character within the defined limits of their experience. This is starting to sound like word salad, so I’ll give an example of this weeks conversation within my own family.
As background: My son’s family is having dinner, doing laundry etc. at my house this week, and for the foreseeable future. The plumbing has failed in their home. My son’s workplace has been hit by a ransomware attack, the owner is on vacation, and needless to say, his focus is on dealing with that crisis as well as Homeland Security etc. And he’s leaving on Monday for a business trip which required him to set up a new laptop so as not to infect the customer’s system.
I’m standing back, listening and watching all the various emotions. Having no water during a SoCal heatwave is inconvenient. So the grumbling and frustration is understandable. Without going further into this, what I’m so aware of is how dependent my family (myself included) are on the modern world as we know it. And yet, I spent years writing a story based in Afghanistan where water, power, technology and infrastructure were virtually non-existent. Ukrainians are currently functioning and defending their country without these amenities at any given time.
In SoCal we have rolling blackouts to conserve the power grid, yet none of us really know how to live without power for an extended period of time. I mean, how long will the food last in the freezer?
All this to say, as writers we must explore other’s lives, experiences, and even the traumas, as I believe it is how we increase our empathy and desire to make a better world. Fiction accomplishes what a newscast cannot. It places us inside that character, and it is our challenge to do so as honestly as we have the capacity.
Great post, David. And I’m just beginning to read, “The Truth Against the World”.
Well, first, thanks for picking up the book, Deb. Hope you enjoy it.
As a matter of fact, Georgie is an example of my having to write outside my own lived experience. I was told not to write about a mixed race character, so I disguised that aspect of her by describing her this way:
“She’s very unusual looking,” the girl remarks.
“Djuna,” the father says, “don’t be rude.”
“I’m not. I just mean, well, her hair, it’s like ink, but her skin—”
“Black Irish,” the mother says.
“Actually,” I reply, “that’s not a term we use ourselves. It’s said about us, not by us.”
“And the eyes,” Djuna says, “they’re, like, Asian.”
“Seriously, Djuna!”
“That’s not at all uncommon. Squint-eyed, it’s called back home, not kindly. Truth be told, there’s as wide a variety of types in Ireland as anywhere, dark to fair. We’re not all ginger-haired, blue-eyed, and freckled. Regardless, her people left the old country long ago, banished to the Caribbean as indentured servants when Cromwell drove them off the land. Since then they’ve moved and mingled and intermarried like all the rest. She’s pure American mutt, though the Irish does shine through, not just in her name. Stubborn people, stubborn genes.”
Anyone who knows the history of Cromwell’s banishment of Catholic Irish to the Caribbean — Barbados, in particular — know that the slaveholders often forced Irish and Africans to have children together to increase their slave holdings without the expense of having to purchase more slaves, and with the hope that miscegenation would make the offspring more valuable. So Georgie’s American mutthood is multi-racial; I just left it to the reader to figure that out (until now).
I simply refuse to live in an all-white world, whether in fact or fiction.
The first time I read Flannery, I wanted to fling the book across the room. I didn’t because it was a library book. It’s only after my conversion that I recognized why I had such a strong negative reaction. I saw myself in some of those despicable characters. But when you read with the eyes of faith, you see moments of grace. Her sharp wit is disarming. You can see it in her earlier works of one panel cartoons while she was in college. My husband and I made a literary pilgrimage to Savannah and Milledgeville for our 25th wedding anniversary. I have my own collection now and my favorite book of hers is actually her nonfiction: Mystery and Manners. Another Southern writer who writes as he sees is Pat Conroy. My favorite book of his is The Water is Wide–a memoir of his teaching year on Dafuskie Island. Toni Morrison’s writing is luminous. I think it’s the lesser writer who worries about what other people are writing. We must write what we care about, what we want to explore. Thanks for a great post.
Thanks, Vijaya. I saw myself in some of her characters as well–the snooty, wiser-than-thou liberals she skewers so expertly. It’s a very valuable experience, finding one’s own reflection in a great book, and being able to recognize and accept how unflattering, and yet how faithful, that reflection is.
David, I’ve read Morrison’s “Beloved” and “Jazz,” and marveled at emotional layers of both: such vivid language and characters, and particularly in “Beloved,” some hard decisions and consequences.
I have that O’Connor collection, and some of her other works, and there’s no shortage of vivid characters and hard decisions in there too. There’s also a preposterous dark comedy in much of her stuff, where you laugh when you’re wincing. I’m thinking of Hazel Motes in “Wise Blood,” and Hula and the traveling Bible salesperson in “Good Country People.”
Some years back I published a three-person POV novel (“Aftershock”) set in San Francisco just after the big earthquake of ’89. One character is a White man, another a White woman and the third a Black man who are thrown together by quake circumstance. He’s a homeless vet, modeled after a man that I passed by every day to work on Market Street downtown, and with whom I talked now and then.
I didn’t know anything about this guy’s personal life, but the novel’s character becomes the moral compass of the book, in a sharply unsentimental way. I felt this character, his hard standards for himself and his perceptions of the world he lived in in the writing, and felt I knew him, but the issues you discuss here, and in publishing circles, have made me wonder if I was stepping out of my lane. But I don’t think so, though I waver at times.
Oh, that’s supposed to be “Hulga” (quite a moniker in itself) in the O’Connor reference.
Hi, Tom:
“I don’t think so, though I waver at times.” That’s writing in a nutshell, my friend.
Two stories.
1) Richard North Patterson, a best-selling author and a full-throated liberal — his Atlantic article on Trump, “I Used to Write Novels. Then Trump Rendered Fiction Redundant,” should leave no doubt on that score — recently wrote an “updating” of To Kill a Mockingbird. He did extensive research in the South, spoke to dozens of people about their experiences of bigotry NOW, not in the fifties, and wrote his book with the hope of sharing his fictionalized observations with his expansive audience. Twenty-nine NY publishing houses turned it down, all because his white lawyer character is in a relationship with a Black woman, and he was told that’s not welcome in today’s publishing world. (I would imagine there were also accusations of it being a “white savior narrative,” something I can’t address as I’ve not read the book.) The novel was ultimately picked up by Saul Bellow’s son, who runs a small conservative publishing house in Nashville. (If you have a WSJ subscription, you can read Patterson’s description of this experience.)
What I fear this points to is a new era of segregation — in publishing. Is that what we want?
2) I ran into my former editor at Thrillerfest. He introduced me to one of his new writers by mentioning the first novel on which we worked together, DONE FOR A DIME, which concerns the murder of an aging Black jazz musician, the young Black men first targeted as suspects, and the burning down of an entire Black neighborhood by the real killer working on behalf of a real estate developer who wants to buy the land for a song and build waterfront condos. Obviously, the book had multiple Black characters, based on many of my own friends as well as clients of my wife’s law practice, many of whom took part in her memorial service when she passed away from cancer. I responded to my editor’s praise with, “It’s doubtful that book could get published today,” to which he responded, “I hear you. Which is why I’m glad we published it when we did.” Me too.
Writing: it ain’t for sissies. Keep on keepin’ on…
Flannery O’Connor either took pleasure in shocking her (mostly white?) audience, like Mark Twain, or (not believable) didn’t notice because she was in the milieu she documented.
It was a wild and free battlefield with waves of roving critics.
But I think a lot of what she did CAN still be done, but maybe more subtly than the two-by-four upside the head. By the dialogue, by the internal monologue of characters, by their interactions with others, from the self-centered pov of a character, almost anything can be SHOWN – without commentary of a narrator, which is always the author in some form.
Not that the pov characters are not ALSO the author, but that, by strangling the narrator, the author is forced to do the job properly – and let the reader BE the character for a long or short while. It’s a different style, definition of a character by what the CHARACTER believes is important, and more chilling.
What a terrific article, David. I was stunned when I read this: “rewritten in accordance with sensitivity reader suggestions as has occurred with Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and Roald Dahl, among others.”
Is that truly happening and I’ve just been oblivious?
I was equally stunned when I read some time ago about a book being pulled from a FL library at the request of one parent who hadn’t even read the book.
Sadly, I have to agree that Flannery’s work would probably not get published today. I wonder how many other great stories will be missed in years to come.
My May post on sensitivity readers covered the whole re-writing of Christie et al: https://staging-writerunboxed.kinsta.cloud/2023/05/12/good-intentions-the-pathway-to-hell-part-2-sensitivity-readers/
And my post the month before was on book banning — but the Florida example you cite is especially egregious, and sadly it’s not isolated.
Thank you for this piece, David. You’ve given me a lot to think about on this hot summer evening in the South. The part of that initial passage of Morrison’s you quoted that resonates with me is: “…I have to place enormous trust in my ability to imagine others and my willingness to project consciously into the danger zones…” I’m at a stage in my writing life where I am beginning to trust myself with this and the ramifications of what that means if I am careless and get it wrong. I am responsible for my creation. Art has the potential to nick an artery and I am conscious that my desire not to harm doesn’t equal playing it safe.
After a certain fail-safe point, a word draws my attention. The word empathy is being used these days by everyone everywhere, and I have come to hold it suspect. There’s something absurd and self-serving about the idea that I can feel someone else’s life, fictional or otherwise. Only someone white immersed in the South could have done what O’Connor did. And (of crucial importance) only if she had a wonderful sense of comedy. That’s the special magic ingredient in O’Connor’s work that makes it register so tellingly.
In the absence of genius, what the rest of us can do is take seriously another person, or a character we develop, to fully sympathize with that person’s place in the world.
As for the current climate, those who manage the writing world are now obligated to look over their shoulders in many new ways. As you do here, you wrote tellingly about this in your previous post. When agents/publishers decide they need “sensitivity readers” to vet manuscripts, they and we are in new territory. The Other has stopped being just a word.
I do my best to operate within the bandwidth of my experience, reading, and capacity for sympathy. As with everyone else who writes, I have to look to others to decide whether I succeed.